Prognostic factors for gastrectomy in elderly patients.

The decision to undergo surgery for gastric cancer patients aged ≥85 years should be made carefully. We retrospectively reviewed the prognostic factors of gastrectomy for 64 patients aged ≥85 years who had undergone curative gastrectomy for gastric cancer. The effects of various clinical characteristics and surgical interventions on survival were retrospectively analyzed. Univariate analysis revealed that sex (male/female; P = 0.001), the extent of gastric resection (total/distal; P = 0.028), the extent of lymph node dissection (D2/<D2; P = 0.019), and blood loss (P = 0.005) were significant prognostic factors for overall survival. Multivariate analysis demonstrated that sex was the only independent prognostic factor. For pneumonia-specific survival, sex was also the only prognostic factor by multivariate analysis.Prognoses of males aged ≥85 years after gastrectomy were significantly worse than those of females, as they were more likely to die of pneumonia.