Effect of Intraoperative Hyperthermic Intrathoracic Chemotherapy After Pleurectomy Decortication for Treatment of Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma.

Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is an aggressive malignancy of the pleural lining with exceptionally poor survival. Median survival from diagnosis is less than 12 months (1). The widespread use of asbestos in past decades together with the long latency of MPM are responsible for the still increasing incidence of MPM (2), affecting 7-40 people per million inhabitants depending on the geographic region (3). The main therapeutic strategies for MPM are surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy (RT). Multimodality treatment for MPM is a topic that has been attracting a lot of attention from researchers, as therapeutic modalities such as surgery, chemotherapy, or radiotherapy have not proven to be effective as single-modality treatments (4). surgery alone is not able to achieve microscopic complete (R0) resection. Therefore, combined treatment modalities have been established in many centres during the last years to achieve a better local tumor control with increasing overall survival (5). In this regard, hyperthermic intrathoracic or intrapleural chemotherapy has been used as one of the multimodality therapies. Intrapleural injection of cytotoxic drugs with hyperthermic perfusion has been proved to enhance cytotoxic effect on tumor cells with limited systemic side effect (6). While cytoreductive surgery plus hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC) has become a standard therapy for intraperitoneal original carcinoma or carcinomatosis peritonei such as pseudomyxoma and colorectal cancer induced ascites (7), limited studies have been reported on the application of hyperthermic intrathoracic chemotherapy (HITHOC) in combination with cytoreductive surgery for the treatment of the malignant pleural mesothelioma (8). With the application of the HITOC after macroscopic complete pleural tumour resection, it is expected to obtain better local tumour control, and thereby improve progression-free as well as overall survival (9).

In this study, we aim to compare results of HITHOC after P/D versus P/D alone in managing patients with localised MPM and our main outcomes are disease free survival, overall survival and possible perioperative complications.