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Copyright ©The Author(s) 2019. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastrointest Oncol. Sep 15, 2019; 11(9): 679-685
Published online Sep 15, 2019. doi: 10.4251/wjgo.v11.i9.679
Current status of adjuvant chemotherapy for gastric cancer
In-Hwan Kim
In-Hwan Kim, Department of Surgery, Catholic University of Daegu, Daegu 42472, South Korea
Author contributions: Kim IH performed the review of the literature and wrote the paper.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The author declares no conflict of interests for this article.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: In-Hwan Kim, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Surgery, Catholic University of Daegu School of Medicine, 33, 17-gil, Duryugongwon-ro, Nam-gu, Daegu 42472, South Korea. kih2yk@cu.ac.kr
Telephone: +82-53-6504065Fax: +82-53-6247185
Received: March 20, 2019
Peer-review started: March 22, 2019
First decision: June 5, 2019
Revised: July 18, 2019
Accepted: August 20, 2019
Article in press: August 21, 2019
Published online: September 15, 2019
Processing time: 177 Days and 3.8 Hours
Abstract

Although radical gastrectomy is a standard treatment for advanced gastric cancer, recurrence remains high. After several large-scale controlled studies have shown the beneficial effects of adjuvant chemotherapy, that treatment emerged as a standard option for advanced gastric cancer after gastrectomy. However, various guidelines from different countries have suggested different adjuvant chemotherapies. Understanding the differences between guidelines is very important for investigating further therapeutic strategies. Fortunately, because there are many ongoing studies about new regimens for adjuvant treatment, it is expected that patients with gastric cancer after surgery will have better outcome.

Keywords: Gastric cancer; Adjuvant chemotherapy; Perioperative chemotherapy; Chemoradiotherapy; Guidelines

Core tip: There are differences in preferred adjuvant therapy for gastric cancer according to the guidelines from different countries. These include the National Comprehensive Cancer Network recommending chemoradiotherapy, the European Society for Medical Oncology recommending perioperative chemotherapy, and the Japanese recommending postoperative chemotherapy. Understanding the differences between guidelines can help in the future investigations of further regimens for adjuvant treatment of gastric cancer.