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When it comes to treating pancreatic cancer, doctors recommend surgery or chemotherapy depending on each particular case. For patients who receive successful surgery, survival rates have still remained relatively low. Even after two years of being cancer free, a majority of cancer patients will relapse, which then lowers their five-year survival rate to 25 percent. So far, there has been no standardized way of treating cancer survivors. Now, in a new study, researchers found that giving cancer survivors a chemotherapy drug after surgery could improve those rates.

"Pancreatic cancer is a disease with a poor prognosis, mainly because of the inability to detect the tumor at an early stage, its high potential for early dissemination, and its relatively poor sensitivity to chemotherapy or radiation therapy," the report wrote.

In this study, the researchers headed by Helmut Oettle, M.D., Ph.D., of the Charite-Universitatsmedizin Berlin, Germany, did a follow-up on patients from a previous trial. In that trial, patients were either given six months of the chemotherapy drug called gemcitabine or observation alone post surgery for pancreatic cancer. The researchers knew that the patients given gemcitabine therapy had reported improvement in disease-free survival after their surgery. The patients, who were from 88 different hospitals in Germany and Austria, had entered the trial between July 1998 and December 2004. The follow-up ended in September 2012.

The researchers reported that 368 patients were randomized into the two groups during the trial. By the end of the follow-up, the researchers calculated that 308 of them, which is equivalent to 87 percent, had relapsed. The median follow-up time was 11.3 years and the median disease-free survival was 13.4 months in the drug treatment group specifically. For the patients who received observation only, their disease-free survival span was 6.7 months.   

The researchers reported a total of 316 deaths (89.3 percent). Of the 36 patients who were still alive, 23 had belonged to the treatment group while 15 of them were in the observation group. The researchers found that a statistically significant difference in the survival rates between both groups. They concluded that patients receiving treatment had higher survival rates after five and 10 years post surgery.

"[These] data show that among patients with macroscopic complete removal of pancreatic cancer, the use of adjuvant gemcitabine for 6 months compared with observation resulted in increased overall survival as well as disease-free survival. These findings support the use of gemcitabine in this setting," the authors concluded.

The study was published in JAMA.