Regional Hepato-Pancreatico-Biliary Unit - Surrey and Sussex

Associated sites:   Liver.co.uk,    Liver.org.uk,   Bowel-cancer.com

Results of Liver Surgery after Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy for Metastatic Colorectal Liver Cancer

Liver Resection

When the service was set up in Guildford the best outcomes published in the world literature showed 37% survival at 5 years. As there was good evidence for the benefit of chemotherapy in converting inoperable patients to an operable situation we opted to offer all patients neo-adjuvant chemotherapy prior to surgery for synchronous metastases. After 10 years the survival curves have been constructed for over 400 consecutive patients and our 5 year survival is 46.3%.

Our incidence of involved margins is 5% and these are amongst the lowest in the literature today. There are many published series from the UK with involved margin rates of 8-31%. The incidence of re-resection of the liver is also low at 5%. There are series with re-resection rates of between 8 - 40%.

We believe that our results are a vindication of the use of neo-adjuvant chemotherapy for patients with colorectal liver metastases prior to surgery.