Despite potentially curative surgery to remove stomach cancer, 50 to 90 percent of patients die of disease relapse. Numerous randomized clinical trials have compared surgery alone with a follow-up regimen of chemotherapy, but definitive evidence was lacking.
The GASTRIC (Global Advanced/Adjuvant Stomach Tumor Research International Collaboration) Group tracked data of 3,838 patients from 17 trials with an average follow-up of more than seven years, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The study found that mortality risk of patients with operable stomach cancer was reduced by about 18 percent, and the five-year overall survival increased from 49.6 to 55.3 percent with chemotherapy.
Researchers concluded that surgery followed by chemotherapy was associated with a statistically significant benefit in terms of overall survival.
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