Invited commentary on 'Yun HR, Kim HC, Kim SH et al. (2010) Cytokeratin staining for complete remission in rectal cancer after chemoradiation. Int J Colorect Dis.

摘要

The publication of Yun et al. 2010 [1] confronts us with two problems, namely, (1) the necessary methods for the pathological examination of rectal carcinoma resection specimens following neoadjuvant radiotherapy (nRT) and chemoradiation (nCR) and (2) the impact of immunohisto-chemistry to the assessment of tumor regression following nRT and nCR.In the literature, we find a considerable variation of reported frequency of pathological complete response (pCR) following nCR, e.g., 6-29% [2] or 10-30% [3]. One reason for these variations are the different pathological methods relating to sampling of tumor tissue for embedding and the different section techniques for embedded blocks [4], A careful procedure has been recommended already in 1997 by Dworak et al. [5].