Post-Surgery Chemo Boosts Survival

For patients with advanced gastric cancer, treatment with chemotherapy after surgery can reduce the risk of cancer related death by 34% over five years compared to surgery alone, researchers said at the 15th ESMO World Congress in Gastrointestinal Cancer.

At the meeting Prof Sung Hoon Noh, a gastric surgeon from Yonsei University College of Medicine, Korea, presented 5-year follow-up from the phase III CLASSIC trial, which added combination chemotherapy to a standard surgical procedure called D2 gastrectomy. The chemotherapy regimen studied in the trial is called XELOX, which is a combination of the drugs capecitabine and oxaliplatin.

CLASSIC was a multinational open-label randomised phase III trial performed in South Korea, China and Taiwan. Patients with stage II–IIIB gastric cancer who had undergone curative D2 gastrectomy were assigned to adjuvant XELOX for eight cycles or surgery alone. The primary endpoint was 3-year disease-free survival.