Clinical Response to Systemic Combined Chemotherapy with 5-Fluorouracil and Cisplatin (FP Therapy) in Patients with Advanced Pancreatic Cancer

Pancreatic cancer shows high mortality and has a poor prognosis.Although the rate of response to all chemotherapeutic regimensis low, some patients have shown improvement of their symptomsafter chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy without obvious tumorregression. We assessed the clinical benefit of systemic combinedchemotherapy with 5-fluorouracil and cisplatin (FP therapy)in 21 patients with advanced cancer of the pancreas. The clinicalresponse to FP therapy was evaluated using two parameters: pain(intensity of pain and consumption of morphine) and performancestatus. A patient was considered to be a clinical responderif one of two parameters was positive and the other was positiveor stable. Four patients (19%) responded. Two of the respondersachieved partial response according to the objective tumor response,and the remaining two showed no change. The survival periodin responders was significant longer than in the other patients.The clinical response may be one parameter for evaluating theresults of treatment for pancreatic cancer, and the longer survivalperiod of the clinical responders in this study supports thisnotion.