Background: The incidence of gastric cancer among the elderly has recently been increasing; however, the prognostic value of age in patients with gastric cancer remains elusive.
Methods: A total of 1473 patients with gastric cancer, who had undergone curative gastrectomy were reviewed to investigate the prognostic significance of age.
Results: Blood vessel invasion and differentiated type were more frequently observed in elderly than nonelderly patients (P < 0.0001) and elderly patients underwent limited lymph node dissection compared with nonelderly patients (P < 0.001). Moreover, chemotherapy was carried out in nonelderly patients more frequently than in elderly patients (P < 0.005). Ten-year survival rates were 70.2 and 81.4% in elderly and nonelderly patients, respectively, and the differences were statistically significant (P < 0.001). Postoperative mortality rates were 3.2 and 2.0% in elderly and nonelderly patients, respectively. Hematogenous recurrence was more frequently observed in elderly patients than nonelderly patients (P < 0.05). Multivariate analysis showed that age was an independent prognostic factor.
Conclusions: Age clinically serves as a simple predictor of survival in patients with gastric cancer and should be taken into account along with conventional clinicopathological variables such as depth of invasion and lymph node metastasis.