Background/purpose: To investigate the long-term outcome and entire treatment course of patients with technically unresectable CRLM who underwent conversion hepatectomy and to examine factors associated with conversion to hepatectomy.
Methods: Recurrence and survival data with long-term follow-up were analyzed in the cohort of a multi-institutional phase II trial for technically unresectable colorectal liver metastases (the BECK study).
Results: A total of 22/12 patients with K-RAS wild-type/mutant tumors were treated with mFOLFOX6 + cetuximab/bevacizumab. The conversion R0/1 hepatectomy rate was significantly higher in left-sided primary tumors than in right-sided tumors (75.0% vs 30.0%, P = .022). The median follow-up was 72.6 months. The 5-year overall survival (OS) rate in the entire cohort was 48.1%. In patients who underwent R0/1 hepatectomy (n = 21), the 5-year RFS rate and OS rate were 19.1% and 66.3%, respectively. At the final follow-up, seven patients had no evidence of disease, five were alive with disease, and 20 had died from their original cancer. All 16 patients who achieved 5-year survival underwent conversion hepatectomy, and 11 of them underwent further resection for other recurrences (median: 2, range: 1-4).
Conclusions: Conversion hepatectomy achieved a similar long-term survival to the results of previous studies in initially resectable patients, although many of them experienced several post-hepatectomy recurrences. Left-sided primary was found to be the predictor for conversion hepatectomy.
Keywords: colorectal liver metastases; conversion therapy; hepatic resection; repeat hepatectomy; sidedness.
© 2020 Japanese Society of Hepato-Biliary-Pancreatic Surgery.