Prognostic Value of Lymph Node Status for Actual Long-Term Survival in Resected Pancreatic Cancer.

BACKGROUND The prognostic factors for long-term survival after curative resection of pancreatic adenocarcinoma are still poorly understood. The purpose of this study was to identify the prognostic factors of long-term survival after resection of pancreatic adenocarcinoma based on actual 5-year survival including different lymph node status classifications. METHOD A total of 106 patients who underwent pancreatectomy were enrolled at our institution and retrospectively analyzed according to actual survival (> vs < 5 years), as well as several currently available node classifications: N0/N1, N0/N1/N2, and lymph-node ratio (LNR) including multivariate logistic regression. RESULTS The actual 5-year overall survival rate of the series was 12.26%. In a univariate analysis, operative blood loss and blood transfusion, completion of adjuvant treatment, histological differentiation, perineural invasion, N0/N1, N0/N1/N2 and LNR were significant predictive factors for actual long-term survival. A multivariate analysis showed that only N0/N1 was an independent predictive factor for actual 5-year survival (OR: 1.593; 0.730-1.325; p= 0.264). CONCLUSION The nodal involved status is the strongest independent unfavorable factor for actual long-term survival after pancreatic resection for adenocarcinoma.