Short-time analysis for adjuvant chemotherapy in patients with early-stage bulky cervical carcinoma

Abstract

Objective: To investigate the effect of adjuvant chemotherapy on early stage cervical cancer with bulky tumor. Methods: Between Mar 1998 and Aug 2002, 162 patients of cervical cancer with Ib∼IIa stage were investigated. 21 patients with bulky tumors (>-4cm) were managed by cisplatin-based chemotherapy followed by radical hysterectomy and pelvic lymphadenectomy (Bulky-chemo group, BC group). The change of tumor size, the depth of stromal invasion, lymph node metastasis and the involvement of surgical specimens were assessed after operation and compared with those in 57 patients with bulky tumors (Bulky-nonchemo group, BN group) and 84 patients with the tumor size less than 4cm (small group, S group) who underwent surgery as the first step of treatment. Chemotherapy with the same regimen was offered for another 1∼2 cycles after operation and the survival situation was followed up. Results: The tumor size of 21 patients in BC group were decreased to varying degrees after chemotherapy, 15 patients were shown as clinical effectiveness (71.43%). And the blood loss during operation (352.35+-19.01ml) was significantly lower than that in BN group (619.05+-35.58ml), t=4.37) and that in S group (568.07+-45.23ml, t=3.36) patients. The incidence of lymph node metastasis (9/78) in patients with bulky tumors was greatly higher than those with tumor size less than 4cm (3/84, X²=4.416); its prevalence rate of deep wall infiltration (8/78) was also higher than that of the latter group (2/84), while with no statistical significance (X²=3.089). Histology showed that there was no case of marginal involvement in all patients. The ratio of both deep stromal invasion (1/21) and positive lymph node (2/21) in BC group was lower than that in BN group (7/57, 7/57 respectively), but neither with statistical significance (X²=0.0103 and 0.8193 respectively). Conclusion: Pre-operative chemotherapy can improve decreasing the primary tumor size and facilitate the following radical surgery. While the effect of adjuvant chemotherapy on subclinical lymph vascular involvement control and in turn its long-term effect on the improvement of relapse-free survival should be further testified.