Progress in Treatment of Advanced Gastric Cancer

• 1、Department of Oncology and Hematology, Dongzhimen Hospital Affiliated to Beijing University of Chinese Medicine

Abstract：Gastric cancer is the fourth most common cancer and is the second leading cause of cancer death worldwide, which is usually diagnosed in advanced stage without the opportunity for curative resection. Chemotherapy is the major treatment for advanced gastric cancer (AGC), and other treatments include palliative surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, biologic and immunologic therapy as well as Chinese medicine. Palliative therapy is used to reduce tumor load and complication occurrence, while radiotherapy is effective to locoregionally advanced gastric cancer. At present chemotherapy plays a leading role in AGC and has a palliative effect in symptomatic patients. For advanced or metastatic gastric cancer, chemotherapy has always been the focus of studies. From FAX, ECF/DCF regimens to REAL-2, ML17032 and SPIRITS trials, numerous results of landscape phrase Ⅲ clinical trials are released, however, no standard regimen has emerged or been accepted as clearly superior over others. Another focus is the trend of biologic and immunologic therapy which is a beneficial supplement to surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, but it is not yet the mainstream. All of these treatments have their functions and obvious side effects, therefore, other comprehensive methods are of equal importance such as Chinese herbal medicine, acupuncture and moxibustion, psychological intervention, which have certain merits in relieving clinical symptoms, reducing toxicity and increasing effectiveness, improving quality of life, preventing metastasis and recurrence, curing ascites and managing cancer pain by combining Chinese medicine and western medicine as a whole.

Keywords： Gastric Carcinoma Advanced Adjunctive Treatment Palliative Therapy