Postoperative chemotherapy for patients with advanced gastric cancer.

The relationship between postoperative chemotherapy and survival time after gastric resection in patients with advanced gastric cancer was examined by retrospectively reviewing data on 916 patients treated in our clinics between 1965 and 1985. Of these patients, 738 were treated postoperatively with antitumor drugs. Postoperative chemotherapy was more often prescribed for those in the advanced stages of malignancy. Univariate analysis revealed that the survival time of patients given postoperative chemotherapy was shorter than for those not receiving chemotherapy, but there was no statistical significance. Multivariate analysis using the Cox regression analysis adjusted for sex, age, and other covariants indicated that operative curability, liver metastasis, serosal invasion, lymph node metastasis, peritoneal dissemination, and tumor size were the important prognostic factors. There was no correlation with postoperative chemotherapy. Our findings rule out any relationship between postoperative chemotherapy and length of survival time for patients with advanced gastric cancer undergoing gastric resection.