Surgical results in gastric cancer

Although the therapeutic results for gastric cancer have markedly improved, it remains the most common cause of cancer death in Korea. Annually, at Seoul National University Hospital, over 700 gastric cancer patients are surgically treated, and, between the years from 1970 and 1997, a total of 11,491 such patients were treated. We will review the principles of surgery for gastric cancer and our comparative studies of immunochemosurgery and postoperative chemotherapy. Further, we will review our evaluation of the survival rate and prognostic factors for 9,262 patients from 1981 to 1996. We conclude that the most important factors for improvement of the postoperative survival of these patients are early diagnosis and curative resection with radical lymph node dissection, followed by postoperative immunochemotherapy. This should be recommended as the standard treatment for patients with gastric cancer, especially patients with Stage III gastric cancer.