Adjuvant chemotherapy, p53, carcinoembryonic antigen expression and prognosis after D2 gastrectomy for gastric adenocarcinoma.

AIM: To investigate adjuvant chemotherapy, p53 and carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) expression and prognosis after D2 gastrectomy for stage I/II gastric adenocarcinoma. METHODS: A total of 286 patients with stage. or. gastric adenocarcinoma who underwent D2 radical gastrectomy between May 2007 and December 2010 were enrolled into this study. One hundred and sixty-nine of these patients received surgery plus adjuvant chemo-therapy, and 117 patients received surgery alone. Tumor expression of p53 and CEA proteins in all patients was evaluated immunohistochemically and correlated with clinicopathological parameters. The Kaplan-Meier curves for overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS) with log-rank testing were used to compare the survival difference. A Cox proportional hazard regression model was used for multivariate analysis. RESULTS: Patients with adjuvant chemotherapy had a significantly better median OS (50.87 mo vs 30.73 mo, P = 0.000) and median DFS (36.30 mo vs 25.60 mo, P = 0.001) than patients with surgery alone in the entire cohort. Consistent results with the entire cohort were found in stage. (P = 0.006 and P = 0.047), stage. (P = 0.005 and P = 0.030), and stage III B/III C patients (P = 0.000 and P = 0.001). The median OS and DFS advantages were confirmed by multivariate analysis (P = 0.000 and P = 0.008) and maintained when the analyses were restricted to fluoropyrimidine monotherapy (P = 0.003 and P = 0.001) and fluoropyrimidine plus platinum regimen (P = 0.001 and P = 0.007), however, not the fluoropyrimidine plus taxane (P = 0.198 and P = 0.777) or platinum plus taxane (P = 0.666 and P = 0.687) regimens. Median OS and median DFS did not differ significantly between the patients with p53(+) and p53(-) tumors (P = 0.608 and P = 0.064), or between patients with CEA(+) and CEA(-) tumors (P = 0.052 and P = 0.989), which were maintained when the analyses were restricted to surgery alone (p53: P = 0.864 and P = 0.431; CEA: P = 0.142 and P = 0.948), adjuvant chemotherapy (p53: P = 0.802 and P = 0.091; CEA: P = 0.223 and P = 0.946) and even different chemotherapy regimens (P > 0.05). CONCLUSION: Patients after D2 gastrectomy for stage II/III gastric adenocarcinoma had significantly better survival after fluoropyrimidine monotherapy and fluoropyrimidine plus platinum. p53 and CEA were not prognostic. (C) 2014 Baishideng Publishing Group Co., Limited. All rights reserved.