Multimodal treatment of gastric cancer.

Gastric cancer is the second leading cause of death from malignant disease worldwide. Although complete surgical resection remains the only curative modality for early stage gastric cancer, surgery alone only provides long-term survival in 20% of patients with advanced-stage disease. To improve current results, it is necessary to consider multimodality treatment, including chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery. Recent clinical trials have shown survival benefit of combining different neoadjuvant or adjuvant protocols compared with surgery with curative intent. Furthermore, the implementation of chemotherapy with novel targeted agents could play an important role in the multimodal management of advanced gastric cancer. In this paper, we focus on a multidisciplinary approach in the treatment of gastric cancer and discuss future strategies to improve the outcome for these patients.