Objective: The goal of the study was to analyze the incidence and patterns of failure in patients with gastric cancer who received D2 dissection and adjuvant chemoradiotherapy (CRT).
Methods: From January 2004 to October 2015, 324 patients with gastric cancer who underwent radical D2 resection followed by postoperative CRT were enrolled. Clinicopathological characteristics and patterns of failure were retrospectively reviewed to identify factors associated with survival and recurrence.
Results: After a median follow-up of 30 months, the 3-year overall survival and 3-year disease-free survival rates of these patients were 60.3 and 51.1%, respectively. 117 patients had recurrence or metastasis, with peritoneal recurrence as the most frequent (20.7%), followed by distant metastasis (14.2%). The most commonly involved distant organs were the liver (5.9%) and bone (4.9%). Locoregional failure occurred in 39 patients (12.0%), with isolated regional failure occurring in only 23 (7.1%). Further multivariate Cox regression analysis revealed N stage to be an independent risk factor for distant failure-free survival (p = 0.012). Independent risk factors for peritoneal metastasis were tumor differentiation (p = 0.022), T stage (p =0.035) and vascular invasion (p = 0.016).
Conclusion: Postoperative CRT has a potential effect on optimizing locoregional control, resulting in only 12.0% of locoregional failure. In patients after D2 resection and adjuvant CRT, peritoneal metastasis was the leading pattern of failure, followed by distant metastasis. Advances in knowledge: Peritoneal recurrence was the most common pattern of failure after D2 dissection and adjuvant CRT, followed by distant metastasis, whereas locoregional relapse was relatively rare. Selection of patients based on the predicted risk of each recurrence pattern may be a reasonable approach to the optimization of treatment strategies.