Background: We investigated the risk of recurrence in laparoscopy-assisted radical gastrectomy.
Materials and Methods: The clinical data on 398 consecutive patients were retrospectively reviewed, who underwent radical gastrectomy with D2-level lymph node dissection for gastric cancer at Gyeongsang National University Hospital between January 2005 and December 2007, were analyzed.
Results: Of the 398 patients with gastric cancer, 261 underwent laparoscopy-assisted gastrectomy (the laparoscopy group) and 137 cases open gastrectomy (the open group). As for stage, stage I was noted in 69.3% of the patients, stage II in 12.8%, stage III in 13.6% and stage IV in 4.3%. The patients were followed up for a mean of 31.7 months, and 50 patients showed recurrence during the follow-up period. The overall recurrence rate was 12.6%, and the mean time to recurrence was 15.8 months. We compared the open and laparoscopy groups in terms of each TNM stages, but there were no significant difference in TNM stage between the 2 groups (p=0.16, 0.22, 0.46 and 0.58). To investigate the risk of recurrence, we performed multivariate analysis for statistically significant factors and found that TNM stage may be a statistically significant factor (p=0.00). Additionally, the relative risks of stages II, III and IV were 20.5, 43.3 and 37.9, respectively, which were higher than that of stage I.
Conclusion: In this study, there was no significant difference in recurrence rate between the open and laparoscopy groups, even in patients with advanced gastric cancer. Therefore, it is concluded that the laparoscopy-assisted gastrectomy may be safe and feasible and have the potential to be an alternative to open surgery even in advanced cases.
Session: Podium Presentation
Program Number: S079
« Return to SAGES 2010 abstract archive
