The Effect of Multidisciplinary Team Discussion Intervention on the Prognosis of Advanced Colorectal Cancer

Purpose: The effects of multidisciplinary team discussion intervention on the treatment and prognosis of advanced colorectal cancer are still controversial. Large sample size studies to evaluate the efficacy in patients with advanced colorectal cancer are lacking. Materials and Methods: We statistically analyzed the data of surgical patients diagnosed with advanced colorectal cancer from 2008 to 2014 by retrospective analysis. Patients were divided into two groups according to whether or not they received multidisciplinary team discussion intervention. After at least 3 years of follow up, differences between two groups were compared with respect to treatment process and patient prognosis. Results: The time to treatment in intervention group was shorter (9.6 ± 4.2 days vs 10.7 ± 5.6 days; p= 0.002). There were no significant differences in recurrence and metastasis rate between the two groups. Multivariate survival analysis suggested that multidisciplinary team discussion intervention reduced the risk of death (HR = 0.677; p = 0.006). And it had significant interaction with tumor invasion and tumor stage, and especially had beneficial effects in the tumor stage IV subgroup (p=0.005) and tumor invasion T4 subgroup (p<0.001). Conclusion: Multidisciplinary team discussion intervention accelerated the treatment process and reduced the death risk of patients with advanced colorectal cancer, especially improved the overall survival of stage IV and invasion T4 patients. The clinical characteristics of tumor invasion and tumor stage must be the primary considerations when judging whether patients need to conduct multidisciplinary team discussions.