The people who have been already diagnosed with the deadly disease of rectal cancer are well conversant with the fact that preoperative short-course radiotherapy is an important treatment for them. However, there is uncertainty about the optimal time interval between the preoperative short-course radiotherapy and rectal surgery. These intervals are known to vary from place to place. The most important consideration for considering this point is that the length of time between preoperative short-course radiotherapy and rectal surgery influences the outcomes after the operation has been successfully conducted. However, to what extent the results can get affected, this is ideally not known owing to a dearth of evidence. Therefore, with an intent to unravel the results, a study was conducted with the aim of understanding this concept. It was discovered that out of the population of 2459 patients, nearly 75 percent of the patients had a time interval of 0-7 days between the preoperative short-course radiotherapy and rectal surgery, while the time interval for 19 percent of the patients was 8-14 days, and it was only 5 percent of the population for which the time material was somewhere between 15-27 days. The outcomes in all the cases differed however, it became evident that not many changes are present in the outcomes if the time gap between the preoperative short-course radiotherapy and rectal surgery was less than one year.
Ref art. https://www.clinicaloncologyonline.net/article/S0936-6555(19)30344-9/fulltext
