Preoperative therapy for local-regional gastric cancer: rationale and review of trials.

The standard approach for patients with local-regional gastric carcinoma is an attempted surgical resection to achieve a "curative resection" (also called an R0 resection) with adequate lymph node dissection. Western patients, who often get suboptimal surgery and have a high incidence of regional lymph node involvement, remain at higher risk of local and systemic relapse after an R0 resection than most Japanese patients. Numerous postoperative adjuvant therapy trials have not yet established an advantage for these patients. Thus in the West, the concept of preoperative therapy is appealing. The preoperative approach can potentially result in downstaging (or downsizing) of the primary tumor and, therefore, increasing the rate of R0 resection. Investigators are still refining the treatment strategies and defining ideal patient population for this approach. Undoubtedly, properly designed prospective randomized trials will be needed to establish any advantage with this approach. A number of newer agents hold a great deal of promise.