European journal of surgical oncology : the journal of the European Society of Surgical Oncology and the British Association of Surgical Oncology
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Multicenter Study Comparative Study Clinical Trial
Lack of prognostic significance of conventional peritoneal cytology in colorectal and gastric cancers: results of EVOCAPE 2 multicentre prospective study.
In digestive cancers, the prognostic significance of intraperitoneal free cancer cells remains unclear (IPCC). The main objective of this study was to assess the prognostic significance of IPCC in colorectal and gastric adenocarcinoma. The secondary objectives were to evaluate the predictive significance of IPCC for the development of peritoneal carcinomatosis (PC) and to evaluate the prevalence of synchronous PC and IPCC. ⋯ The presence of IPCC was not an independent prognostic and didn't add any additional prognostic information to the usual prognostic factors related to the tumour (pTNM and differentiation). Moreover the presence of IPCC detected with this method didn't appear to predict development of PC. Peritoneal cytology using conventional staining doesn't seem to be a useful tool for the staging of colorectal and gastric cancers.