Laparoscopic vs Open Pancreatectomy for Body and Tail Pancreatic Cancer

Plain-language summary

Open distal pancreatectomy (ODP) has been commonly employed for the treatment of a variety of cancers in body and tail of pancreas. Although many general surgical procedures have been increasingly performed laparoscopically or with laparoscopic assistance, until the current decade, laparoscopic pancreatic surgery had not been performed for its complicated anatomy. But laparoscopic distal pancreatectomy (LDP) has been widely accepted as a standard treatment for body and tail pancreatic cancer because there is no anastomosis in it, and LDP has gradually become the first choice for these cancers in clinical work. Although there are several studies about the comparison between LDP and ODP, most are retrospective and there is no agreement in surgical margin, lymph node numbers and prognosis to identify the oncological differences between the two surgical approaches. The investigators' pilot study showed that patients with body and tail pancreatic cancer underwent LDP had a better prognosis compared with the ones undergoing ODP, with no statistics differences in postoperative complications and mortality. This perspective RCT study is performed to confirm whether LDP would improve the prognosis for patients with body and tail pancreatic cancer compared with ODP.

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