Background/significance:

Neoadjuvant chemotherapy improves survival in MIBC but its uptake in clinical practice is variable. The benefits of adjuvant chemotherapy are controversial, especially with the recent presentation of 3 RCTs not included in previous MA.

Objectives:

We sought to summarise the effects of chemotherapy, both neoadjuvant and adjuvant, on survival in MIBC.

Methods:

We included published summary data from recent MA and RCTs. Eligible RCTs compared the addition of chemotherapy, neoadjuvant or adjuvant, to local treatment versus local treatment alone. We searched CENTRAL, PubMed, MEDLINE, proceedings of ASCO and clinicaltrials.gov from 2004 to 2012. The primary outcome was overall survival (OS). Disease-free survival (DFS) and adverse events (AE) were secondary outcomes. Pooled hazard ratios (HR), confidence intervals (CI) and p-values (p) were estimated with fixed effects model.

Results:

We included 21 RCTs (n=3986), 12 of neoadjuvant (n=3047) and 9 adjuvant chemotherapy (n=939). The addition of chemotherapy significantly improved OS (HR 0.86, 95% CI 0.79 to 0.93, p=0.0004). Separate analyses of neoadjuvant therapy and adjuvant therapy yielded significant results in both subgroups (HR 0.89, 95% CI 0.81 to 0.98, p=0.02; HR 0.75, 95% CI 0.63 to 0.90, p=0.002; respectively; p-value for interaction 0.11).  There were larger benefits in DFS (HR 0.77, 95% CI 0.71 to 0.84, p<0.000001). The most common grade 3 or 4 AE were haematological, gastrointestinal and renal impairment with median frequencies of 33%, 15% and 2% respectively in neoadjuvant; and 15%, 21% and 27% in adjuvant trials.

Conclusion:

Meta-analysis of available randomized trials indicates that chemotherapy, both adjuvant and neoadjuvant, improves survival in MIBC. A direct comparison of these two strategies in a large scale randomised trial is needed to determine which is optimal.