Optimal indications for palliative chemotherapy in elderly patients with metastatic or recurrent gastric cancer.

Abstract

207 Background: Gastric cancer is the second causes of cancer-related deaths in the world and its incidence of advanced gastric cancer (AGC) in the elderly is increasing as a result of increased life expectancy. However, elderly patients have been underrepresented in many kinds of chemotherapy clinical trials. Therefore it is difficult to evaluate the efficacy and safety of chemotherapy for elderly patients and select the appropriate patients aged 70 years or older who are likely to benefit from the chemotherapy. Methods: There were 265 patients with primary unresectable or recurrent gastric cancer treated at our institution between April 2007 and March 2014. Of all, 90 patients aged 70 years or older were retrospectively identified. We evaluated the efficacy of the chemotherapy and prognostic significance of clinico-pathologic factors to identify the optimal indications for chemotherapy. Univariate and multivariate analyses were perfomed on the base-line characteristics such as patient’s performance status (PS), gender, chemotherapy regimens, history of gastrectomy, presense of co-morbidity, serum LDH level, serum C reactive protein, and nutritional status, at the initiation of the first-line chemotherapy. Results: The median overall survival time (OS) was 343 days and the median TTF on first-line chemotherapy was 111 days. The toxicity was mild and tolerable. There were no significant difference in overall survival between patients receiving monotherapy and combination therapy. On multivariate analyses, PS 1 or 2 (hazard ratio (HR), 1.883; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.047–3.390), presence of primary tumor (HR, 1.916; 95% CI, 1.063–3.448) at the initiation of the first- line chemotherapy were identified as significant independent poor prognostic factors for overall survival. Especially in patients aged 75 years or older, only PS was an independent prognostic factor for OS (HR, 3.703; 95% CI, 1.314–9.900). Conclusions: Analysis of our results shows that patients aged 70 years or older with good performance status and absence of primary tumor might achieve clinical benefit from chemotherapy.