Retrospective Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2023. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastrointest Oncol. Jan 15, 2023; 15(1): 155-170
Published online Jan 15, 2023. doi: 10.4251/wjgo.v15.i1.155
Survival benefits and disparities in radiation therapy for elderly patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma
Bi-Yang Cao, Qian-Qian Wang, Le-Tian Zhang, Chen-Chen Wu, Fang Tong, Wei Yang, Jing Wang
Bi-Yang Cao, Qian-Qian Wang, Le-Tian Zhang, Chen-Chen Wu, Fang Tong, Wei Yang, Jing Wang, Department of Radiation Oncology, First Medical Center of Chinese PLA General Hospital, Beijing 100853, China
Bi-Yang Cao, Le-Tian Zhang, Chen-Chen Wu, Medical School of Chinese PLA, Beijing 100853, China
Author contributions: Cao BY and Wang QQ contributed equally to this work; Cao BY and Wang QQ designed the research and wrote the first manuscript; Zhang LT, Wu CC, and Tong F contributed to conceiving the research and analyzing data; Yang W and Wang J conducted the analysis and provided guidance for the research, and they were co-corresponding authors; all authors reviewed and approved the final manuscript.
Institutional review board statement: Our research is based on the National Cancer Institute's SEER program. For this study, we signed the SEER research data agreement to access SEER information, using reference number 15159-Nov2020. Data were obtained following the approved guidelines. The Office for Human Research Protection considered this research to be on nonhuman subjects because the subjects were patients who had been researched by the United States Department of Health and Human Services and were publicly accessible and de-identified. Thus, no institutional review board approval was required.
Informed consent statement: Patients were not required to give informed consent to the study because this study used a public database with anonymous clinical data and the patients’ personal privacy information was not available.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All the authors report no relevant conflicts of interest for this article.
Data sharing statement: The datasets used or analyzed during the current study are available from the SEER dataset repository (https://seer.cancer.gov/).
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Jing Wang, PhD, Professor, Department of Radiation Oncology, First Medical Center of Chinese PLA General Hospital, No. 28 Fuxing Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100853, China. wangjingmd@hotmail.com
Received: November 14, 2022
Peer-review started: November 14, 2022
First decision: November 24, 2022
Revised: November 27, 2022
Accepted: December 21, 2022
Article in press: December 21, 2022
Published online: January 15, 2023
Processing time: 57 Days and 4 Hours
Core Tip

Core Tip: Older patients represent a unique subgroup of the cancer patient population, for which the role of cancer therapy requires special consideration. The effects of radiation therapy (RT) on the outcomes of elderly patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) are not well-defined in the literature. Herein, data were extracted from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database to identify factors associated with RT administration and explore the impact of RT on survival in elderly patients with PDAC. This study highlights the survival benefit of RT in elderly patients with PDAC on a larger population scale and proposes possible obstacles to accessing treatment for elderly patients with PDAC.