Objective: We examined the applicability and safety of staging laparoscopy(SL)in the treatment of advanced gastric cancer.
Methods: We retrospectively reviewed the gastric cancer cases that were examined using SL between January 2015 and December 2019 at our hospital.
Results: Within this period, 59 gastric cancer patients underwent SL, of whom 53 were diagnosed with SL at first examination. The rare complications of SL were postoperative nausea and vomiting(1 case). In 47.5%(28/59)of patients, we observed peritoneal dissemination including positive lavage cytology. In 2 cases, peritoneal dissemination was found during curative resection despite not being detected by SL. Thus, the false negative rate of peritoneal dissemination discovery was 6.7%(2/30). Among the individuals who were diagnosed as P1 or CY1 at first, subsequent SLs were performed in 6 cases, and 5 patients were re-assigned as P0CY0, of whom 4 underwent conversion surgery.
Conclusions: SL is an essential and safe examination method for defining the treatment strategy in advanced gastric cancer. However, further improvements are needed to reduce the false negative discovery rate and to advance gastric cancer treatment by increasing reliability of diagnosis.