Systematic Review: Adjuvant Chemotherapy for Locally Advanced Rectal Cancer with respect to Stage of Disease

Table 1

Main characteristics of included studies.

	Glimelius et al. 2005 [11]	CCCSGJ 1995 [12]	Fisher et al.; 1988 [13]	Kato et al.; 2002 [14]	Kodaira et al.; 1998 [15]	Hamaguchi et al. 2011 [16]	QUASAR 2007 [17]	Sakamoto et al. 2007 [18]
Study design	Multicentre RCT	Multicentre RCT	Multicentre RCT	Multicentre RCT	Multicentre RCT	Multicentre RCT	Multicentre RCT	Patient based meta-analysis of multicentre RCTs
Number of patients	2224	2001	555	289	834	606	3239	2091
Stage of rectal cancer	II and III	II and III	II and III	II and III	II and III	III	II and III	II and III
Intervention arm(s)	Surgery; adjuvant CT	Arm 1: surgery; adjuvant intra-arterial + systemic CT; arm 2: surgery; adjuvant CT	Arm 1: surgery; adjuvant CT; arm 2: surgery; adjuvant RD	Surgery; adjuvant CT	Surgery; adjuvant CT	Surgery; adjuvant CT	Surgery; adjuvant CT	Surgery; adjuvant CT
Control arm	Surgery	Surgery	Surgery	Surgery	Surgery	Surgery	Surgery	Surgery
Chemotherapy regimen	Arm 1: 5FU + levamisole; arm 2: 5FU + leucovorin; arm 3: 5FU + leucovorin + levamisole	Arm 1: MMC + 5FU; arm 2: MMC + 5FU	5-FU + semustine + vincristine	UFT	MMC + UFT	UFT	5-FU +; L-folinic acid	UFT
Intention to treat analysis	Yes	Not reported	Not reported	Not reported	Not reported	Not reported	Yes	Not reported
Outcomes	OS	DSF and OS	DSF and OS	DSF and OS	DSF and OS	DSF and OS	DSF and OS	DSF and OS
Risk of bias	Low	Low	Low	Low	Low	Low	Low	Low; (except reporting bias)
Methodological quality	High	High	High	High	High	High	High	High

CT: chemotherapy, RCT: randomised controlled trial, RD: radiotherapy, 5-FU: 5-fluorouracil, MMC: mitomycin C, UFT: Tegafur-uracil, OS: overall survival, and DSF: disease-free survival, based on SIGN notes on methodology checklist.