Pancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumors and Lymph Nodes: How Much Surgery is Enough?

Excerpt

Diagnostic and therapeutic modalities have advanced tremendously in the field of neuroendocrine malignancies over the past decade. As our understanding of the disease improves, the treatments for local, local-regional, and systemic disease improve with it. There are now more hormone analogues, pathway inhibitors, and chemotherapeutic agents to treat difficult disease. In fact, the field of targeted radiopharmaceuticals has flourished and grown because of the work in neuroendocrine. However, surgery remains the foremost treatment option to help with tumor control, symptoms, complications, and sometimes cure. Unfortunately, the detailed techniques for neuroendocrine surgery and the benefits relative to the risks are sometimes more subtle with neuroendocrine than other more established cancers. …