Gastric cancer in young patients who underwent curative resection. Comparative study with older patients

Although several studies demonstrated the poor prognosis of young patients with gastric cancer, there were few reports about the survival of young patients who underwent radical surgery. We retrospectively reviewed the hospital records of 697 patients with curatively resected locally advanced gastric cancer to compare the pathologic findings and prognosis of young patients (aged < 40 years; 91 patients) with those of older (aged > or = 40 years; 606 patients) patients. There were no significant differences in location of tumors, Borrmann types, tumor invasion, and pathologic stage between both age groups. Despite the male predominance in older patients, the male-to-female ratio was nearly equal in young patients (p = 0.022). A significantly higher percentage of young patients showed poorly differentiated histology including signet ring cell and undifferentiated carcinoma than older patients (p < 0.0001). Adjuvant chemotherapy was more frequently performed in the young patients with a variety of different regimens (85.7 vs. 72.3%; p = 0.009). The 5-year overall survival rate revealed no statistically significant differences between the young and older patients (53.1 vs. 56.6%; p = 0.820). In conclusion, the young patients with curatively resected locally advanced gastric cancer showed similar survival compared to that of older patients.