Baseline characteristics
tumor
TUMOR
A total of 67 patients with LARC randomized to receive IC-CRT (n = 35) or LC-CRT (n = 32) were included in this prospective phase II randomized trial conducted between March 2015 and September 2018. Two patients in the LC-CRT arm did not have surgery due to their comorbidities, two patients in the IC-CRT arm refused treatment before starting RT, and three patients did not come for follow-up after RT; therefore, those seven patients excluded from the analysis.The two treatment groups were homogenous in terms of age and sex. The clinical and pathological characteristics of the tumor and treatment characteristics were also similar between the study groups. The median interval between surgery and neoadjuvant treatment was 12 weeks for all patients (10 weeks for the IC-CRT group and 13 weeks for the LC-CRT group). Sphincter-sparing surgery was performed on 86.7% of the patients in the LC-CRT group and 76.7% of the patients in the IC-CRT group. R0 resection performed on 90% of the patients in both the LC-CRT and IC-CRT groups (