Treatment Outcomes and Survival Study of Gastric Cancer Patients: A Retrospective Analysis in an Endemic Region

Purpose: To present information about prognostic factors of gastric cancer patients treated in our Erzurumcenter including age, gender, tumour location, pathological grade, stage and the effect of treatment on survival.Materials and
Methods: This retrospective study was performed on patients who applied to our clinic anddiagnosed as gastric cancer. Age and gender of the patients, primary location, histopathological characteristics,TNM stage of the gastric cancers (GCs), treatment applied, oncological treatment modalities and survivaloutcomes were studied. A univariate analysis of potential prognostic factors was performed with the log-ranktest for categorical factors and parameters with a p value < 0.05 at the univariate step were included in themultivariate regression.
Results: A total of 228 patients with a confirmed diagnosis of gastric cancer wereincluded in the study with a male/female ratio of 1.47. Median follow-up period was estimated as 22.3 (range, 3to 96) months. When diagnosis of the patients at admission was analysed, stage III patients were most frequentlyencountered (n=147; 64.5%). One hundred and twenty-six (55.3%) underwent surgical treatment, while 117(51.3%) were given adjuvant chemotherapy. Median overall survival time was 18.0 (±1.19) months. Mean overallsurvival rates for 1, 2, 3 and 5 years were 68±0.031%, 36±0.033%, 24±0.031% and 15.5±0.036%, respectively.Univariate variables found to be significant for median OS in the multivariate analysis were evaluated with Coxregression analysis. A significant difference was found among TNM stage groups, location of the tumour andpostoperative adjuvant treatment receivers (p values were 0.011, 0.025 and 0.001, respectively).
Conclusions: Thisstudy revealed that it is possible to achieve long-term survival of gastric cancer with early diagnosis. Besides, inlocally advanced GC patients, curative resection followed by adjuvant concomitant chemoradiotherapy basedon the McDonald regimen was an independent prognostic factor for survival.