Impact of postoperative infection on long-term survival after potentially curative resection for gastric cancer.

We focused on the impact of postoperative infection on long-term survival after potentially curative resection for gastric cancer. Postoperative surgical and medical complications have been implicated as a negative predictor of long-term outcome in various malignancies. However, there have been no published reports assessing the impact of complications arising from postoperative infection on survival in gastric cancer. We studied a population of 1,332 patients who underwent curative resection for gastric cancer. These patients were divided into two groups based on the occurrence (141 patients, 10.6%) or absence (1,191 patients, 89.4%) of postoperative complications due to infection. We investigated the demographic and clinicopathological features of each patient with and without postoperative complications from infection, and thereby the impact of postoperative infection on long-term survival. Patients with postoperative infection had significantly higher frequency of males, upper side tumor location, and total gastrectomy as a surgical procedure, more advanced stage of gastric cancer, and greater age compared with those without postoperative infection. Patients with complications due to postoperative infection had significantly more unfavorable outcome compared with those patients without postoperative infection. Multivariate analysis demonstrated that age, preoperative comorbidity, blood transfusion, tumor depth, nodal involvement, and postoperative infection correlated with overall survival. We conclude that postoperative complications from infection are a predictor of adverse clinical outcome in patients with gastric cancer. However, further immunological study and prospective trials are necessary to confirm the biological significance of these findings.