Preoperative Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy in Patients With Resectable Pancreatic Cancer

Pancreatic cancer is a cancer with a poor prognosis and a high mortality rate. The prognosis of surgically resectable pancreatic cancer is better than that of unresectable pancreatic cancer. But the prognosis is still poor enough to report a 2-year disease-free survival rate of 47.0% despite the application of standard treatment. Preoperative chemotherapy or radiotherapy for pancreatic cancer has been performed for a long time, especially for locally advanced pancreatic cancer. However, there are very few studies on the application of preoperative chemotherapy or radiotherapy for borderline resectable or resectable pancreatic cancer. The PREOPANC trial is a representative randomized study to investigate the effect of preoperative chemo/radiation therapy in borderline resectable or resectable pancreatic cancer. As a result, the overall survival, progression-free survival, local control, and distant control rates were significantly superior in preoperative therapy group. However, when only patients with resectable pancreatic cancer were analyzed separately, there was no significant difference in overall survival rate or complete resection rate. In 2020, retrospective propensity score matching analysis using the national cancer database revealed that the addition of preoperative stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) showed a significant increase in overall survival rate rather than preoperative chemotherapy alone. In addition, SBRT also showed a significant increase in overall survival rather than conventional fractionated RT. In summary, the current standard treatment for resectable pancreatic cancer is surgical resection, but a higher survival rate can be expected when preoperative therapy is added. However, there is no study that focused on the role of preoperative SBRT. Therefore, this study aims to confirm the effectiveness of adding preoperative SBRT alone in resectable pancreatic cancer.