Combined Cytoreductive Surgery and Early Postoperative Intraperitoneal Chemotherapy for Peritoneal Carcinomatosis of Gastric Cancer.

PURPOSE Peritoneal seeding is the most common type of metastasis or recurrence and one of the poor prognostic factors in gastric cancer. Moreover, there are as yet no effective treatment modalities available. Recently some research groups suggested the benefit of combined cytoreductive surgery and intraperitoneal chemotherapy, but the related experiments remain in the trial stage. Therefore, we assessed the safety and evaluated the efficacy of combined cytoreductive surgery and early postoperative intraperitoneal chemotherapy (EPIC) in gastric cancer patients with peritoneal carcinomatosis of gastric cancer. MATERIALS AND METHODS From Nov. 1997 to May. 2002, eighteen cases of combined cytoreduction and EPIC were performed in the Korea Cancer Center Hospital due to gastric cancer with peritoneal carcinomatosis. The control group consisted of 33 patients who had no resection without EPIC during the same periods. After combined cytoreductive surgery and EPIC, all patients received systemic chemotheraphy with the exception of 2 patients who could not tolerate the treatment. We retrospectively investigated the clinicopathologic features and analyzed the factors affecting the prognosis. Median follow-up period was 11.9 months (range 0.5~61 months). Statistical analysis was performed by SPSS 11.0 for Windows. A P-value less than 0.05 was considered as statistically significant. RESULTS There was one case of the treatment-related mortality (5.5%) and seven cases of treatment-related complications (38%) in the combined cytoreductive surgery and intraperitoneal chemotherapy group. One-, 3- and 5-year survival rates of cytoreductive surgery plus EPIC were 57.6%, 25.9% and 13.0%, respectively, and those of the control group were 18.2%, 3% and 0%, respectively. Survival of the combined cytoreductive surgery plus EPIC group was better than that of the control group (p=0.0026). In multivariate analysis of prognostic factors affecting the survival, combined cytoreductive surgery plus EPIC (p=0.02) and systemic chemotherapy (p=0.019) were independent prognostic factors. CONCLUSION Although a small number of cases were included in this study, combined cytoreductive surgery plus EPIC showed survival benefit and retained a comparable complication rate compared with the control group.