Clinicopathological and Prognostic Factors in Node-Negative Gastric Cancer Patients Who Underwent Curative Resection

OBJECTIVE In our study, we aimed to determine the clinicopathological and prognostic factors and their effects on overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS) in patients who underwent curative resection for gastric cancer and did not have lymph node metastasis.METHODS A total of 138 patients followed for lymph node-negative gastric cancer between 2001 and 2016 were included in the study. The effects of clinicopathological and prognostic factors such as age, sex, tumor lo-calization, tumor differentiation, tumor TNM stage, type of surgery, lymphovascular invasion, perineu-ral invasion, presence of Helicobacter pylori, tumor size, histopathologic subtype of the tumor, complete blood count, tumor markers, and adjuvant treatments on OS and DFS were analyzed.RESULTS In the current study, Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) performance score before adjuvant treatment (hazard ratio [HR]=2.320; p<0.001), largest tumor diameter (HR=1.198; p=0.029), post-oper-ative carbohydrate antigen 19-9 (CA19-9) level (HR=1.104; p=0.047), and post-operative carcinoembry-onic antigen (CEA) level (HR=1.183; p=0.043) were found to be independent predictors of recurrence rate. In addition, ECOG score before adjuvant treatment (HR=2.585; p<0.001), post-operative CEA level (HR=1.128; p=0.005), and post-operative CA 19-9 level (HR=1.080; p=0.006) were independent predictors of mortality risk in OS analysis.CONCLUSION Some clinicopathological and prognostic factors, such as ECOG score, largest tumor diameter, post-op-erative CA 19-9 level and post-operative CEA level, could assist us to predict recurrence and mortality in node-negative gastric cancer patients who underwent curative resection. More comprehensive studies are required to be carried out in this context.