Original Guideline
MEDLINE (1966 to March [week 3] 2002), CANCERLIT (1983 to October 2001), and the Cochrane Library (2002, Issue 1) were searched with no language restrictions. "Pancreatic neoplasms" (Medical Subject Heading [MeSH]) was combined with "chemotherapy, adjuvant" (MeSH), "radiotherapy" (MeSH), "immunotherapy" (MeSH), and each of the following phrases used as text words: "chemotherapy," "radiotherapy," "radiation," "immunotherapy." These terms were then combined with the search terms for the following study designs or publication types: practice guidelines, meta-analyses, and randomized controlled trials. The Physician Data Query (PDQ) clinical trials database on the Internet (http://www.cancer.gov/cancerinfo/pdq/) and the proceedings of the 1996–2001 annual meetings of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the 1999–2001 annual meetings of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (ASTRO) were searched for reports of new or ongoing trials. Relevant articles and abstracts were selected and reviewed by each reviewer independently, and the reference lists from these sources were searched for additional trials.
2004 Update
The original literature search was updated in February 2004 using the MEDLINE (March 2002 to February week 1 2004), EMBASE (1996 through 2004, week 6), and Cochrane Library databases (to Issue 3, 2003), along with abstracts from the 2003 proceedings of the annual meetings of American Society of Clinical Oncology and American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology. The PDQ database was also searched for relevant ongoing trials. Due to a decision in April 2003 by the U.S. National Library of Medicine to no longer update the CANCERLIT database, as of May 2003, the CANCERLIT database will no longer be searched when updating.
Inclusion Criteria
Articles were selected for inclusion in this systematic review of the evidence if they were fully published reports or published abstracts of randomized trials and meta-analyses comparing combinations of chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and/or immunotherapy to each other or supportive care alone in patients with locally advanced pancreatic cancer. Data on overall survival for patients with locally advanced pancreatic cancer had to be reported. Other outcomes of interest were disease-free survival, local control, adverse effects, and quality of life. If patients with metastatic disease were included in the study, results had to be reported separately for patients with locally advanced disease.
Exclusion Criteria
- Phase I and II studies were not considered for inclusion in this report because of the availability of randomized trials.
- Letters and editorials were not considered.