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Perspectives in anaesthesia for cancer surgery

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Abstract

Background

It is a fact that inflammatory scores are important prognostic factors in cancer surgery. Many data have been published last year showing that inflammation is a causative event in many cancers and a concomitant event in all malignant tumours.

Monitoring of the inflammation

What is new is that we can assess inflammatory status during the preoperative period of our cancer patients with simple and widely available parameters, such as the neutrophil/lymphocyte ratio. This kind of biomarkers will be helpful, for the clinicians, to stratify the patients and, for the researcher, to incorporate it in clinical trials.

Rationale for trials after database analyses

Promising clinical trials, focusing on perioperative inflammation, are ongoing. Rationale for these trials came from database analyses. This kind of analyses must be extended to follow the long-term effects of our interventions.

Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs

We have shown a correlation between non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, especially ketorolac, and improved outcome (metastasis-free survival and/or overall survival) in breast and lung cancer patients.

Conclusion

Focusing on a high-risk group with preoperative inflammation could lead to a clinical trial to test the effect of ketorolac on cancer outcome.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Fondation Saint-Luc, the Department of Anesthesiology, Saint-Luc Hospital, the Commission du Patrimoine of the Université catholique de Louvain and the Belgian Society of Anaesthesia and Resuscitation. None of these founders were implicated in this work.

Conflict of interest

The authors attest no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anesthesiology, Cliniques universitaires Saint-Luc, Université catholique de Louvain, 10-1821, av. Hippocrate, 1200, Brussels, Belgium

    Patrice Forget & Marc De Kock

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  1. Patrice Forget
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  2. Marc De Kock
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Correspondence to Patrice Forget.

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Forget, P., De Kock, M. Perspectives in anaesthesia for cancer surgery. J Cancer Res Clin Oncol 140, 353–359 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00432-013-1522-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00432-013-1522-1

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