For patients with metastatic colorectal cancer who have resectable liver metastases, survival outcomes at 5 years do not differ signifi cantly for treatment with laparoscopic versus open liver resection, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Investigators examined long-term oncologic outcomes after laparoscopic versus open liver resection in a single-center trial involving 280 patients with resectable colorectal liver metastases. Patients were randomly assigned to either laparoscopic surgery (133 patients) or open surgery (147 patients). The rates of 5-year survival were 54% and 55% in the laparoscopic and open groups, respectively, at a median follow-up of 70 months (hazard ratio [HR], 0.93). In the laparoscopic and open groups, the rates of 5-year recurrence-free survival were 30% and 36%, respectively (HR, 1.09). “A limitation of our trial is that it was not powered to detect diff erences in secondary end points and was not designed to address a noninferiority hypothesis for survival outcomes,” the authors write. “Therefore, small-to-moderate diff erences in survival outcomes (in favor of either laparoscopic or open surgery) cannot be excluded, and clinicians should be aware of this when interpreting results.”
