Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 13 pp 17337—17348
Age as a modifier of the effects of chemoradiotherapy with infusional 5-fluorouracil after D2 dissection in gastric cancer
- 1 Division of Hematology and Oncology, Department of Internal Medicine, Chi-Mei Medical Center, Tainan, Taiwan
- 2 Division of Hematology and Oncology, Department of Internal Medicine, Chi-Mei Medical Center, Liouying, Tainan, Taiwan
- 3 Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan
- 4 Department of Senior Welfare and Services, Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Tainan, Taiwan
- 5 Department of Radiation Oncology, Chi-Mei Medical Center, Liouying, Tainan, Taiwan
- 6 National Institute of Cancer Research, National Health Research Institutes, Tainan, Taiwan
- 7 Department of Oncology, National Cheng Kung University Hospital, College of Medicine, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan
- 8 Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, National Cheng Kung University Hospital, Tainan, Taiwan
Received: February 11, 2021 Accepted: June 8, 2021 Published: July 5, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203223How to Cite
Copyright: © 2021 Wu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Adjuvant concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CCRT) is the standard care for patients with resected advanced gastric cancer, but its survival benefits remain undetermined in patients undergoing D2 lymph node dissection (D2 dissection). We evaluated safety and efficacy of adjuvant CCRT with 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) versus chemotherapy alone in 110 gastric cancer patients with D2 dissection treated in Taiwan between January 2009 and January 2013. All the 71 patients receiving adjuvant CCRT were treated with daily infusional 5-FU and radiotherapy. Adjuvant CCRT was associated with higher risks of major hematologic (56.3% vs. 23.8%, p = 0.002) and gastrointestinal (46.9% vs. 14.3%, p = 0.027) toxicities and death (12.5% vs. 0.0%, p = 0.041) in patients above 70 years old, but this was not the case in those ≤70 years of age. Univariate Cox proportional regressions identified adjuvant CCRT as a factor for better overall survival (OS) (hazard ratio [HR]=0.52; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.27–0.99) and disease-free survival (DFS) (HR=0.46, 95% CI: 0.24–0.88), but it was not a significant factor for OS or DFS after adjusting for other factors in the multivariate analysis. However, in stratified analyses by age, we found adjuvant CCRT was an independent prognostic factor for better OS (HR=0.07; 95% CI: 0.01–0.38) in patients ≤70 years old, but not in those above 70 years of age. Therefore, it was concluded that age may to be a modifier of the effects of adjuvant CCRT.