Efficacy and safety of wait and see strategy versus radical surgery and local excision for rectal cancer with cCR response after neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy: a meta-analysis

Background: Neoadjuvant therapy can shrink tumors, increase anus preservation rate, and protect anal function. Radical surgery need cut off the diseased bowel, clean up the lymph nodes, and then restore bowel function. It could bring traumatic effect and poor postoperative quality of life to the patient. Local resection requires removal of the diseased bowel with circular negative margin. The surgical trauma is small, and the postoperative quality of life is good. In this meta-analysis, we aimed to evaluate the efficacy and safety between wait and see strategy (WS), radical surgery (RS), and local excision (LE) of rectal cancer patients with clinical complete response (cCR) response after neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy.

Methods: We searched PubMed, Cochrane Library, CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure), and Wanfang databases to compare wait and see strategy with radical surgery and local excision for rectal cancer with cCR response after neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy up to March 2020. We collected the data of local recurrence, distant metastasis, cancer-related death, overall survival, and disease-free survival and used RevMan 5.0 to carry out the meta-analysis. Continuous data were evaluated by the standardized mean differences (SMD) with 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs), and dichotomous data were evaluated by relative risks (ORs or RRs) with 95% CIs. We aimed to compare the advantages and disadvantages of the three groups.

Results: Eleven English studies with 1131 patients were included. There were 412 patients in WS group, 678 patients in RS group, and 41 patients in LE group. WS group had a higher local recurrence rate than RS group (OR 7.32, 95% CI 3.58 to 14.95, P < 0.001). There was no significant difference in the other data between the three groups.

Conclusion: Compared with the RS group, the WS group had an increased risk of local recurrence. However, the WS group had a similar DFS and OS compared with the RS group and the local excision group. Hence, we speculated that the WS group would have similar results as the surgery group for patients with cCR status.