Hartmann's Versus Intersphincetric APE: A Prospective, Multicentre Study

14,000 new cases of rectal cancer are diagnosed each year, frail and elderly patients represent a rising proportion of these patients. Whilst the gold standard is often to remove the tumour and restore bowel continuity, surgeons will often avoid this procedure in this group of patients as they unfortunately tolerate surgical complications very poorly. Such surgical complications may present with life threatening sepsis, can prolong hospital stay, delay further cancer therapy and in the elderly or frail patient often leads to loss of independence and quality of life. In this setting, there are two alternative procedures (Hartmann's procedure OR intersphincteric APE) that may be used and these are employed in roughly equal measure in the UK (nationwide survey, Dec 2013, unpublished data). It is anecdotally felt that Hartmann's procedure (HP) has a greater risk of surgical complications (30%) and a few small retrospective studies have shown this (1-3), however there are no prospective data to support this view. Whilst some surgeons do choose intersphincteric APE (IAPE) on the basis of a lower surgical complication rate, many do not due to perceived limitations in the technique (longer operating time, risk of tumour perforation), which are unproven. We feel that a larger, prospective dataset is required to demonstrate the superiority of IAPE over HP and convince the remaining surgeons to change procedure. We have explored the possibility of a full randomised trial to answer this question, however this is not feasible due to the difficulty of randomisation of patients. Very little data are available regarding the use of IAPE in the setting of rectal cancer, however many surgeons who do employ the technique, specifically adapt their technique in this setting to reduce the chances of tumour perforation (two stage, stapling off rectum before removing anal canal separately). It is possible that those surgeons who prefer HP have not considered this, and combined with the lack of prospective data are reluctant to change technique. We are confident that if we can demonstrate a significant difference in surgical complication rate and promote a modification to the IAPE surgical technique then we can significantly reduce surgical harm to these frail patients.