Surgery Before Chemotherapy to Extend Survival in Upper GI Cancers

Chukwuemeka Ihemelandu, MD, an associate professor of Surgical Oncology at Georgetown University Medical School, explain the role of surgery in prolonging life and disease progression in patients with upper gastrointestinal cancers.

According to Ihemelandu, surgery it the best option for patients with metastatic disease. He stresses, however, that the benefit of surgery depends on how soon after diagnosis the surgery occurs. In cases where surgical interventional occurs early on, patients are more likely to move on to systemic therapy and have better survival outcomes.

Transcription:

0:07| So, for patients who present with metastatic disease, what's going to offer them the best survival benefit is the surgery itself. And what do I mean by that? It's being able to remove as much of the disease as possible. Now, the earlier the patients get to us the better for the patients because we're able to clear them up all their disease.

0:26| You know, we've published data and most other centers that do what we do have published data that shows that if you're able to clear the patients of all their disease, or at least a great majority of the disease, those are the patients that do well. And so, from a surgical standpoint, we're pushing for those patients who we can actually take to the apparent room and get rid of the majority of the disease. And after we've done that, we then treat them with what we call the heated intraperitoneal chemotherapy to address the microscopic disease or residual disease will leave him behind.