While surgical trauma can induce microenvironmental changes that theoretically favor metastasis, extensive clinical trial evidence demonstrates that open and minimally invasive surgical approaches result in comparable long-term cancer recurrence rates.
Surgical trauma can theoretically promote tumor recurrence in laboratory and animal models, but clinical trial evidence shows comparable long-term recurrence rates for open and minimally invasive surgeries.
The claim touches on the long-debated medical hypothesis that surgical stress or manipulation (such as opening body cavities) might promote cancer spread or recurrence. On one hand, basic science and animal models (such as papers [4] and [8]) show that surgical injury and ischemia-reperfusion can trigger immunosuppressive niches and growth factors that favor metastasis. On the other hand, robust clinical evidence and randomized trials (such as papers [0], [2], [3], [5], and [6]) consistently demonstrate that traditional open surgeries do not result in higher recurrence or lower survival rates when compared to minimally invasive approaches, indicating that the overall clinical impact of surgical access type on disease spread is contested or negligible compared to the underlying cancer biology.