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Abstract:
Patients with gastric cancer have a poor prognosis. Because curative surgery is often impossible (metastatic disease) or extremely difficult (locally advanced tumors), and the majority of patients undergoing curative resection relapse, chemotherapy has been actively studied in gastric cancer. Several combination chemotherapy regimens have been developed with high activity in locally advanced and metastatic disease. Among them are 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) plus high dose methotrexate plus doxorubicin (FAMTX). It represents the reference treatment in many clinical trials. Recent schedules like etoposid plus cisplatin (EAP); etoposid plus leucovorin plus 5-FU (ELF) and epirubicin plus cisplatin plus 5-FU (ECF) show encouraging response rates, their toxicity is considerable, however. Randomized trials comparing chemotherapy with best supportive care showed an increase in overall survival and in quality-of-life. Up to now adjuvant chemotherapy has failed to improve survival as compared with surgical controls. Only half of the patients with locally advanced gastric cancer (LAGC) undergo macroscopic and microscopic tumor-free resection. Preoperative chemotherapy has shown very promising results even in patients who had primarily unresectable tumors. Approximately half undergo R0 resection after downstaging induced by active chemotherapy and the long-term survival rises to about 20%. There are hopes that the newest regimes may do this: new cytostatic drugs and the immuno-chemical approach to combine cytostatic drugs with cytokines will be of great importance.