[State of the treatment for gastrointestinal cancer]

We reviewed the results of chemotherapy for gastrointestinal cancer. In Western countries, FAMTX or ECF is recognized as the standard therapy for gastric cancer. In Japan, no standard chemotherapeutic regimen has been established yet, but FP or MTX/5-FU are often used as a first line chemotherapy. There have been only a few clinical trials of adjuvant chemotherapy for gastric cancer in which this regimen was identified as having a statistically significant effect. For colon cancer, 5-FU plus LV are now used as the standard therapy. Recently, however, it has been shown that 5-FU + LV combined with CPT-11 is more active than 5-FU + LV alone. The efficacy of oral anticancer agents such as UFT + LV, S-1, and capecitabin have also been shown to be equally or more active than i.v. administration of 5-FU and LV, so that the standard therapy for colon cancer will be changed in near future.