2003 Volume 11 Issue 1-2 Pages 215-229
Among 370 patients who underwent the radical resection of primary colorectal cancer over a 17-year period, 114 had stage III-Dukes'C cancer. After excluding 10 patients treated intravenously with drugs other than 5-FU or with hepatic arterial injection and 9 patients who had uncommon tumors other than typical differentiated adenocarcinoma, the remaining 95 patients were investigated to assess the utility of Japanese-style oral postoperative adjuvant immunochemotherapy for stage III colorectal cancer. Sixty-one patients received postoperative oral chemotherapy with or without immunotherapy and had a 5-year survival rate of 60.7%, while the survival rate was only 48.8% for patients without such therapy (p=0.0136). When the 61 patients were further divided into those treated with chemotherapy plus immunotherapy (immuno-chemotherapy; n=38) and those treated with chemotherapy alone (chemotherapy-only; n=23), the 5-year survival rates of the immunochemotherapy, chemotherapy-only, and non-chemotherapy groups were 62.7%, 57.4%, and 48.8%, respectively (immunochemotherapy vs. non-chemotherapy, p=0.0172). The 5-year survival rate was also calculated for 69 patients whose background factors were matched by the propensity score matching method and a significant difference was found between the immunochemotherapy and non-chemotherapy groups (p=0.0265). These results suggest that Japanese-style oral immunochemotherapy is useful as postoperative adjuvant therapy for stage III-Dukes'C colorectal cancer.
