Lymph node involvement correlation with survival in advanced gastric carcinoma: univariate and multivariate analyses.

The aim of this study was to elucidate what factors affect the survival of patients with advanced gastric carcinoma. The relationship between the survival of 282 patients over a period of 15 years and 12 prognostic factors was investigated. In univariate analysis, lymph node involvement, depth of invasion, gross form, type of operation, maximum tumor diameter, and lymphatic invasion were found to correlate significantly with survival. Lymph node involvement, gross form, type of operation, and depth of invasion were selected by the Cox proportional hazard model with variable selection methods and found significant. Lymph node involvement was shown to correlate most significantly with survival by both univariate and multivariate analyses. Kaplan-Meier survival curves could indicate that the survival rates of the selected factors were worsening in proportion to the relative risk ratios. These results suggest that further contrivance of therapies should be considered for patients in high risk categories.