[Gastric cancer: current status of multimodality treatment].

BACKGROUND

The overall prognosis of gastric cancer with an overall 5-year survival of 25% is still poor despite improvements of the surgical and perioperative procedures. To improve the surgical treatment results other therapeutic options as chemo- and/or radiotherapy have been investigated for more than 20 years.

METHODS

After a literature review, the results of actual trials of multimodality treatment were analysed and described.

RESULTS

Adjuvant treatment was less effective compared with neoadjuvant or perioperative chemotherapy performed in advanced tumour categories T3/4. Actual trials could show that the rate of curative (R0) resection can be augmented resulting in an increase of the overall 5-year survival rate of more than 10 %.

CONCLUSION

To confirm this trend, further studies with high pathological and surgical quality control are necessary as well as a more exact definition of prediction and evaluation of the response following chemotherapy.