Prognostic factors in advanced gastric cancer after second-line treatment.

Abstract

201 Background: Advanced gastric cancer (AGC) is a highly lethal disease worldwide with a median overall survival (OS) of less than 12 months. Ramucirumab was the first targeted agent to show survival benefit in the second-line (2L) treatment of AGD. From the REGARD trial, women exhibited a trend towards a worse survival when compared to men. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed the outcome of a Spanish cohort of 55 AGC patients who had received at least two consecutive chemotherapy lines of treatment at our institution. We preselected some clinical parameters (age, gender, Lauren subtype, Her-2 status, grade of differentiation, primary tumor localization and resection, TNM stage, neoadjuvant/adjuvant administration, mono/polychemotherapy in 2L, irinotecan- or taxane-based 2L, Trastuzumab treatment, and administration of third-lines [3L]) to be tested as potential prognostic factors. We focused our analysis on the gender effect in OS after 2L treatment in AGC. The SPSS software package was used for all statistical analyses (Mann-Whitney U test, Chi Square, Kaplan-Meier, Cox regression). Results: Women, diffuse subtype, poorly differentiated tumors, sub-cardia location, single-agent 2L and 3L administration were the clinical characteristics with a significant shorter OS by the univariable analysis. Median OS of women (5 months, 95%CI 3.9-6.0) was significant lower than that in men (13 months, 95%CI 7.9-18.0) by both Log-Rank and Breslow tests (p 0.002). We found no significant differences in age, progression-free survival or time-on-treatment between men and women. Female gender was significantly associated with more taxane-based 2L and with less 3L treatment administration. When 3L treatment administration was excluded in the multivariable analysis, female gender was the only independent prognostic factor of all the clinical parameters included in our review (HR 0.33, 95%CI 0.15-0.75, p 0.008). Conclusions: Our retrospective study found that gender, Lauren subtype, grade of differentiation, primary tumor location, polychemotherapy and 3L administration may be potential prognostic factors in AGC after 2L treatment. Female gender was an independent prognostic factor in our Spanish cohort.