Progress in liver resection for colorectal liver metastases

Liver resection is the only curative option offering long-term survival in patients with colorectal liver metastases (25 to 40% five-year survival). It can be achieved with low mortality and low morbidity. However, this surgical approach can be offered only for approximately 10 to 20% of patients with colorectal liver metastases. Therefore, 80 to 90% of patients are excluded from liver surgery and will receive palliative therapies. Recent advances have selected subgroups of patients presenting initially unresectable disease to achieve curative resection. These new multidisciplinary strategies were developed in order to increase safely the resecability inpatients with initially non-resectable liver metastases and to improve treatment of recurrences in patients with isolated liver metastases either by repeat hepatectomies or local tumor destruction. These strategies offer the same survival than observed inpatients with initially resectable liver metastases. Our series includes 438 patients operated on for colorectal liver metastases between 1987 and 2002. Overall mortality was 1.1%, morbidity was 26%. Actuarial 5-year and 10-year survival were respectively 29.6% and 20.1%.