Table 4. Survey of observations and hypotheses among the fields of surgery, dormancy, inflammation, circulating tumour cells, wounding and immunology.

Hypothesis or observation	Reference
‘the perioperative period can be considered a “perfect storm” of immunosuppression and inflammation in the presence of residual or circulating tumour cells.’	[48]
Genetic damage lights the fire and inflammation is the fuel that feeds the flame of cancer	[49]
Dormancy is a well accepted phenomenon in cancer
Surgery results in systemic Inflammation for a week (colon and breast) IL-6 in serum	[50, 51]
Neutrophils are generated in large numbers after injury	[52, 53]
Neutrophils can extravasate and provide Extracellular Traps to capture cancer cells	[52, 53]
Localisation of secondary tumours at points of injury (1914 report) (Jones and Rous)	[54]
Description of cancer as similar to wound healing (Chaffer, Dvorak)	[56, 57]
Perioperative ketorolac reduces use of opioids (proangiogenic).	[58]
Bimodal relapse patterns apparent in solid tumours	[current paper]
Tumour grows at any site of wounding in Rous sarcoma avian model, controlled with inflammation	[43,44]
Daily aspirin can lower mortality of breast and colon cancer	[59]
Platelets sequester angiogenesis regulators (Klement)	[62]
Cancer patients have circulating tumour cells that correlates with prognosis particularly in TNBC (Karhade)	[71]
Peak in CTC after mastectomy but 3–7 days later (Camara)	[65]
Localised metastatic disease at site of recent physical trauma - termed ‘Inflammatory oncotaxis’ (Walter)	[55]
Capillary permeability increased from 30 to 70 kDa to 2,000 kDa after inflammation. (Egawa)	[67]
The IL-6 serum level correlates with prognosis in many cancers (Lippitz)	[69]