[Adjuvant chemotherapy for advanced gastric cancer]

For recent 40 years, many authors reported the results of adjuvant chemotherapy for advanced gastric cancer including 5-fluorouracil, uracil and tegafur, mitomycin C, cytosine arabinoside. OK-432 adriamycin, methotrexate, and cis-pltatin in solitary use of combinations. It is difficult to find a standard effective adjuvant chemotherapy for advanced gastric cancer in these reports. The reasons of this unclearness were as follows; (1) In phase III studies, surgery alone was not a control group in some reports. (2) The number of patients was too small to evaluate statistically. (3) Inter-institutional differences had important roles in the results of multicenter study in the other studies. For the future plans on adjuvant chemotherapy, it is important to make a simple designed protocol, and perform it as a multicenter study including institutions with minimum inter-institutional differences.