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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.
Saito et al. (Thu,) studied this question.