Palliative surgery for gastric cancer in elderly patients

Poor survival rate of elderly patients affected by locally advanced or metastatic gastric cancer is related to primary tumour complications. Bleeding is the most important adverse event, other major complications are gastric outlet obstruction and nutritional deprivation. Rarely the patients will perforate the stomach cancer and there is a sudden end to their life; contamination of the ascites result in a rapid death. Thus, an aggressive approach toward palliation of this condition is resection: in this manner the expected survival is approximately one year. Derivation techniques or endoscopic treatments are applied in those patients whose operative risk is inacceptable; in these cases poor median survival is expected. The aim of this report in to refer about the experience in palliative surgery for gastric cancer in the Department of Geriatric Surgery of the University of Padua.