Survival estimating following recurrence in gastric cancer patients and its relative factors

  Introduction: Gastric cancer (GC) is one of the most common cancers in the world. Despite of improvements in cancer treatment, survival rate of these patients is low. There are various factors that influence on the recurrence. The aim of this study was to assess the survival of the gastric cancer patients with relapse and determine the related risk factors.   Materials and Methods: A total of 93 gastric cancer patients with relapse who entered from 21 March 2003 to 21 March 2007 to the cancer institute of Imam Khomeini Hospital (Tehran) were surveyed in this study. The survival time was considered monthly from the time of cancer diagnosis up to death or end of study. The effect of various risk factors such as gender, diagnosis age, tumor site, pathologic stage of disease, type of treatment, degree of differentiation on survival patients after relapse are considered in this study.   Result: From 93 patients with relapse, 79.6% were men. 48.4% of patients were died during their follow up. The mean age from diagnosis to relapse was 15.7 ± 11.7 and half of the patients experienced relapse 11 months after the treatment. Survival mean and median were 14.5 and 9 months respectively. One, three and five year survival of the patients was 0.42, 0.19 and 0.13 respectively. Pathologic stage, age at diagnosis, degree of differentiation and using radiography were significantly related to the survival.   Conclusions: Half of the patients experienced relapse in the first year following their treatment. Thus, monthly referral of patients is necessary for timely diagnosis.