Prognostic Factors and Adjuvant Treatments for Surgically Treated Cancers of the Biliary Tract: A Multicentre Study of the Anatolian Society of Medical Oncology (ASMO)

Background: Biliary tract cancers are rare, and surgical resection is the standard treatment at early stages.However, reports on the benefits of adjuvant treatment following surgical resection are conflicting. This studyaimed to evaluate the factors affecting survival and adjuvant treatments in patients with surgically treated biliarytract cancers. Materials and
Methods: Patient clinical features, adjuvant treatments, and efficacy and prognosticfactor data were evaluated. Survival analyses were performed using SPSS 15.0.
Results: The median overallsurvival was 30.7 months (95% confidence interval [CI], 18.4-42.9 months). Median survival was 19 months (95%CI, 6-33) for patients treated with fluorouracil based chemotherapy and 53 months (95% CI, 33.2-78.8) withgemcitabine based chemotherapy(p=0.033). On univariate analysis, poor prognostic factors for survival weregalbladder localization, perineural invasion, hepatic invasion, a lack of adjuvant chemoradiotherapy treatment,and a lack of lymph node dissection. On multivariate analysis, perineural invasion was a poor prognostic factor(p=0.008).
Conclusions: Biliary tract cancers generally have poor prognoses. The main factors affecting survivalare tumour localization, perineural invasion, hepatic invasion, adjuvant chemoradiotherapy, and lymph nodedissection. Gemcitabine-based adjuvant chemotherapy is more effective than 5-fluorouracil-based chemotherapy.