Gastric cancer with high risk of intraperitoneal progression: clinical course and current treatments

Locally advanced gastric cancer with a high risk of intraperitoneal progression is characterized by poor prognosis. After radical surgery, most patients die during the first two years post-operation as a result of disease progression. The prevailing type of progression and the leading cause of death in patients with gastric cancer is implantation metastasis. The main risk factors for peritoneal carcinomatosis in such patients include: gastric tumor invasion into serosa, the presence of tumor cells in peritoneal washings, the largeness of the tumor as accompanied by extensive serous lesions, infiltrative type of tumor growth, histological variants of gastric cancer prone to implantation metastasis and metastatic lesions in regional lymph nodes. Systemic chemotherapy does not provide effective eradication of subclinical peritoneal carcinomatosis in patients with locally advanced gastric cancer. The vast majority of patients who suffer from locally advanced gastric cancer and run a high risk of implantation metastasis are characterized by subclinical peritoneal dissemination at primary diagnosis, which means a rapidly fatal prognosis for such patients. In recent years, however, the paradigm of treatment of locally advanced gastric cancer has changed: a combination of surgery and adjuvant hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy is used increasingly, and presents an alternative to the previously accepted surgery only approach. It is also likely to increase the survival rate.