[Preoperative adjuvant chemotherapy with oral anticancer agents for stomach cancer]

We performed preoperative chemotherapy using oral anticancer agents and compared the survival rate with that of the untreated group. The statistical significance of effects in the oral anticancer agent groups was tested by multivariate analysis of the survival rate. The subjects were 488 patients who underwent resection of primary stomach cancer in the Chiba Cancer Center between 1981 and the end of 1991. Patients who were gross type 0 preoperatively, who died in the hospital or who had multiple or double cancer, were excluded. They were divided into two oral anticancer agent groups with 158 patients in the Tegafur group, 163 in the 5-FU group, and 167 patients in the untreated group. In addition to preoperative adjuvant chemotherapy, the age, gender, age, localization, gross type, depth of invasion, histological lymph node metastasis and the old histological stage were analyzed as explanatory variables. In both the Tegafur and 5-FU groups significant differences of p = 0.034 and p = 0.024 were obtained. Factors which had significant effects on survival rate were age (p < 0.0001), histological lymph node metastasis (p < 0.0001), age (p = 0.0001), depth of invasion (p = 0.002), and gross type 4 (p = 0.043). Therefore preoperative administration of oral anticancer agents appeared to have a significant effect on survival rates.