Does adjuvant or neoadjuvant therapy improve prognosis of gastric cancer?

Despite the decreasing frequency of gastric cancer in most Western countries prognosis could not be improved by surgery alone in the past. Advanced tumor stage due to late diagnosis is one of the reasons for this observation. Contrary to breast and colorectal cancer, postoperative chemotherapy failed to improve prognosis in gastric cancer. Small number of patients in Western studies, insufficient surgical procedures and the high frequency of locoregional relapse may be attributed for this observation. Intraperitoneal, adjuvant chemotherapy showed a positive impact on survival in Asian studies only, but was also used sucessfully as a part of a multimodality approach in Western phase II trials. Since neoadjuvant therapy proved to create downstaging of tumor size in some patients with advanced gastric cancer some working groups tried to influence prognosis of potentially resectable tumors by preoperative chemotherapy, surgical resection and postoperative, adjuvant therapy in the recent past. However, the efficacy of this therapeutic approach has to be reconfirmed in a controlled, phase LII fashion.