Gastric cancer

Surgical resection is the primary method of obtaining a potential cure for patients with gastric adenocarcinoma. However, chemotherapy or chemoradiotherapy offer significant improvement in survival over surgery alone. Much of the difficulty in deciding the optimal treatment strategy is choosing between perioperative chemotherapy or adjuvant chemoradiotherapy. Adding to the complexity is the potential for incorporating treatment strategies based on clinical trials performed in Asia. There is likely a difference in tumor biology between Eastern and Western patients with gastric adenocarcinoma, in addition to the clear differences in screening, pathologic assessment, and surgical technique...

The authors focused on the current surgical treatment of resectable gastric cancer, and significance of peri- and post-operative chemo or chemoradiation. Gastric cancer is the 4(th) most commonly diagnosed cancer and the second leading cause of cancer death worldwide. Surgery remains the only curative therapy, while perioperative and adjuvant chemotherapy, as well as chemoradiation, can improve outcome of resectable gastric cancer with extended lymph node dissection. More than half of radically resected gastric cancer patients relapse locally or with distant metastases, or receive the diagnosis of gastric cancer when tumor is disseminated; therefore, median survival rarely exceeds 12 mo, and 5-years survival is less than 10%...