Treatment of neuroendocrine gastroenteropancreatic tumours with somatostatin analogues: a personal case series and review of the literature Trattamento dei tumori neuroendocrini gastroenteropancreatici con analoghi della somatostatina: casistica personale e revisione della letteratura

Summary Neuroendocrine tumours (NETs) are rare neoplasms characterized by low clinical incidence (approximately 1 case/100,000/year). The most frequent sites are in the digestive tract (70%). The aim of this retrospective study is to assess objective and symptomatic responses (limited to refractory chronic diarrhoea) after somatostatin analogue treatment and to compare our case history data with that available in the literature. The Rare Hormonal Tumour Group of Cremona has, since 1990, observed 165 patients with digestive NETs. Of these, 57 (34.5%) were treated with somatostatin analogues, of whom 20 were considered eligible for this study. The patients were divided into two groups: the first group included all 20 patients, while the second group included 9 tumour cases in 7 patients already studied in the first group who, during the follow-up, received a modified dose or different molecule type or a diverse formulation of the analogue. In this study, the high rate of disease stabilization in both groups (60% and 66.6%, respectively) confirmed that somatostatin analogues guarantee better responses in NETs with low grades of malignancy. Control of chronic refractory diarrhoea also demonstrated an overall partial response (PR) in 90.9% of the cases, which corresponds with improvement in the patient’s Riassunto