Abstract / Summary
Abstract Introduction Pathologic complete response (pCR) to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in gastric cancer increases overall survival. Various factors such as tumor location, grade, presence or absence of H. pylori infection, and histology may affect the response rate. Method Seventy-five non–metastatic gastric cancer patients were evaluated in this retrospective study. The patients received 4 cycles of the FLOT regimen as a neoadjuvant, followed by surgery. pCR was reported according to the TRG system by two expert pathologists. Result The majority of patients had a partial pathologic response (42.7%), even though 28% reached complete and near-complete pathologic responses and 29.3% showed no or trivial response. Only 6.7% of patients reached the pCR. There was no statistically significant association between age (P-value: 0.38), gender (P-value: 0.94), tumor location (P-value: 0.95) and H. pylori infection (P-value: 0.27) with pCR rate. In addition, pCR was higher in patients with well-differentiated adenocarcinoma (60%) compared to those with moderately or poorly differentiated cancer (20% and 24%, respectively) (the P-value were 0.045 and 0.024 respectively), although we did not find any significant relation between the tumor differentiation and the response to the treatment (P-Value: 0.15). Conclusion The pathological complete response rate to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in gastric cancer is low and is not affected by factors such as age, sex, tumor location, and H.pylori infection. The only predictive factor may be tumor differentiation. Further future research studies might be conclusive.