Background: Advanced or metastatic gallbladder carcinoma is regarded not much sensitive to chemotherapy. Standard chemotherapy regimens have not been established up to now.
Patients: We report on 5 patients with advanced gallbladder carcinoma who received chemotherapy with gemcitabine.
Results: Of these 5 patients, 3 demonstrated a partial remission and stable disease was achieved in another patient. Only one patient had no benefit from treatment with gemcitabine.
Conclusion: We conclude that gemcitabine may be an effective drug in the palliative treatment of gallbladder cancer, and thus its efficiency warrants evaluation in further studies.