Palliative gastrectomy or gastrojejunostomy for symptomatic stage IV gastric cancer: a dual center, retrospective, propensity matched cohort study.
Zhang Xiaojie X, Ren Hu H, Zhang Lin L, Li Zongze Z et al.
Palliative surgery is considered to release symptoms for symptomatic stage IV gastric cancer (GC) patients. However, whether palliative gastrectomy or gastrojejunostomy should be conducted was still controversial. Therefore, the current study aims to compare the long-term prognosis of palliative gastrectomy and gastrojejunostomy for symptomatic stage IV GC patients. Symptomatic stage IV GC patients in the China-Japan Friendship Hospital and China National Cancer Center between January 2000 to December 2023 were retrospectively reviewed. The short-term safety and long-term survival outcomes were compared between palliative gastrectomy and gastrojejunostomy for symptomatic stage IV GC patients. A 1:1 propensity score matching (PSM) was performed to balance covariates between groups. In total, 2705 gastric cancer with stage IV were retrieved and finally 197 individuals were therefore enrolled in the study based on the search and inclusion and exclusion criteria. Compared with palliative gastrectomy group, palliative gastrojejunostomy group had shorter operation time (P < 0.001) and lower proportion of intraoperative blood transfusion (37 [32.174%] vs. 9 [14.516%], P = 0.011). While no significant difference was observed about postoperative complications between the two groups. Multivariate survival analysis demonstrated similar prognosis for symptomatic stage IV GC patients who underwent palliative gastrectomy or palliative gastrojejunostomy before (HR: 1.215, 95%CI: 0.859~1.717, P = 0.270) and after (HR: 0.756, 95%CI: 0.526~1.087, P = 0.131) applying PSM. Palliative gastrectomy might provide no survival benefit compared with Gastrojejunostomy for symptomatic stage IV gastric cancer. However, further multicenter, prospective studies with a larger sample size were needed to verify these findings.