Fifty years of progress in gastric cancer.

As with every human malignancy, the diagnosis, staging, and treatment of patients with gastric cancer have undergone enormous evidence-based change over the last 50 years, largely as a result of increasingly rapid developments in technology and science. Some of the changes in clinical practice have derived from prospective randomized controlled trials (RCTs), whereas others have come from study of meticulously maintained prospective databases, which define the disease's natural history over time, and occasionally from in-depth analysis of a single patient with an unexpectedly good or poor outcome. Herein we summarize the more important changes in gastric cancer management and the data supporting those changes.