surgical outcomes in small PNETs

  • Research type

    Research Study

  • Full title

    Comparison of oncological and surgical outcomes between formal pancreatic resections and parenchyma-sparing resections for small pancreatic neuroendocrine tumours (PanNETs < 2 cm)

  • IRAS ID

    269312

  • Contact name

    Lulu Tanno

  • Contact email

    l.tanno@soton.ac.uk

  • Sponsor organisation

    University Hospital Southampton NHS F T

  • Duration of Study in the UK

    0 years, 4 months, 30 days

  • Research summary

    pancreatic neuroendocrine tumours are rare slow growing tumours. Recently they are being discovered accidentally while the tumour is still small (less than 2cm in size) on scans patient's have for other medical reasons. It is believed that when the tumour is small, the risk of being an aggressive cancer is low. However, there has been some suggestions that this may not be the case, and in some patients there is a risk that the tumour has spread to the lymph node already. Therefore, recently the European neuroendocrine tumour society has suggested that in young healthy patients, surgery and removal of these lesions should be considered.
    For surgical removal of these small lesions, there are two different options. One option is removing the small tumour all together with surrounding normal pancreas and lymph nodes (formal resection). The other is to just remove the small lesions alone, without removing the lymph node or the normal pancreas (enucleation). If successful, this second technique considered better for the patient as no normal pancreas will be removed as part of the surgery. But this technique is associated with higher rate of moderately to serious complications after surgery (such as leak from pancreas).
    In this study, we are collecting information from patients who had these two types of surgery for these small tumours. We aim to first look at the patients who had formal resection to gain understanding of how aggressive by looking at the number of patient's with tumour spread to the lymph nodes (which will be available from the pathology reports). After this, we want then compare the rate of serious complications patients and compare how often this occurred in the formal resection group and those who had enucleation.

  • REC name

    London - Bromley Research Ethics Committee

  • REC reference

    20/LO/0201

  • Date of REC Opinion

    30 Mar 2020

  • REC opinion

    Further Information Favourable Opinion