Usefulness of Surgical Staging of Gastric Cancer in Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy Candidates: A Single-center Retrospective Study.

BACKGROUND

The current expectancy of long-term survival of patients with pathological stage (pStage) III gastric cancer (GC) is not satisfactory. However, neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) is expected to improve survival rates in these patients. An appropriate pretherapeutic diagnostic strategy is necessary for selecting patients who are eligible for NAC. Surgical findings can often identify serosal invasion or metastatic lymphadenopathy, thereby facilitating the selection of candidates for NAC. Therefore, we aimed to evaluate the accuracy and potential of surgical staging in improving the management and survival of patients with GC.

PATIENTS AND METHODS

We assessed the accuracy of surgical staging in comparison to preoperative staging using data from patients who underwent gastrectomy for GC. In addition, differences in survival after using the surgical staging criterion were assessed.

RESULTS

A total of 915 patients were evaluated in this study. The sensitivity of surgical staging in detecting pStage III in the surgical T4N0-3 plus surgical T3N1-3 group was satisfactory (79.3%). The proportion of patients with pStage I using the surgical staging criterion was 7.8%.

CONCLUSION

Surgical staging using laparoscopy or laparotomy may assist in selecting candidates for enrollment in clinical trials for NAC.