Association of adjuvant chemoradiotherapy with survival in patients with resected gallbladder carcinoma: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Abstract

477 Background: The impact of adjuvant radiotherapy (ART) on survival in gallbladder carcinoma (GBC) remains underexplored, and conflicting results have been reported. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to clarify the impact of ART in GBC. Methods: Systematic literature search was performed in the several databases following the PRISMA guidelines from inception to August 2016. We included the studies which reported survival outcome in the patients with or without ART following curative surgery. Results: Fourteen retrospective studies including 9364 analyzable patients met all inclusion criteria, but most of them had a moderate risk of bias. Generally, ART group had more patients with unfavorable characteristics than the surgery alone group. Nevertheless, pooled results showed that ART significantly reduced the risk of death (HR, 0.54; 95% CI, 0.44-0.67; p < 0.001) and recurrence (HR, 0.61; 95% CI, 0.38-0.98; p = 0.04) compared to the surgery alone group. Exploratory analyses demonstrated that subgroup of patients with lymph node positive disease (HR, 0.61; p < 0.001) and R1 resection (HR, 0.55; p < 0.001) had survival benefit from ART, while those with lymph node negative disease did not (HR 1.06; p = 0.78). No evidence of publication bias was found (p = 0.663). Conclusions: This work is the first meta-analysis evaluating the role of ART and provides convincing evidence that ART may offer survival benefit, especially in high risk patients. However, further confirmation with a randomized prospective study is needed to clarify the subgroup of GBC patients who would most benefit from ART.