Progress in Treatment for Advanced Gastric Cancer / 中国肿瘤临床

ABSTRACT

Gastric cancer is the fourth most common cancer and is the second leading cause of cancer death worldwide. Gastric cancer is usually in advanced stage at diagnosis, without opportunity for curative resection. Chemotherapy is the major treatment for advanced gastric cancer (AGC), and other treatments include palliative surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, biologic and immunologic therapy as well as Chinese medicine. Palliative therapy is used to reduce tumor load or complication occurrence, while radiotherapy is effective for locoregionally advanced gastdc cancer. At present, chemotherapy plays a leading role in AGC treatment and has a palliative effect on symptomatic patients. For advanced or metastatic gastric cancer, chemotherapy has always been the focus of studies. Results of studies of FAX, ECF/DCF regimens and Phrase ill clinical trials of REAL-2, ML17032 and SPIRITS have been released. With the application of EOX, XP, S-1/CDDP, IF, FOLFOX and XELOX regimens, the outcomes of advanced gastdc cancer are improved. However, there is no standard regimen accepted as supedor over others. Biologic and immunologic therapy are beneficial supplements to surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, but are not yet the mainstream. All of these treatments have obvious side effects. Other comprehensive methods are of equal importance, such as Chinese herbal medicine, acupuncture and moxibustion, and psychological intervention. Combined with western medicine, the above methods have certain merits in relieving clinical symptoms, reducing toxicity,increasing effectiveness, improving quality of life, preventing metastasis and recurrence, reversing multidrug resistance of tumor cells, and curing ascites and managing cancer pain.