[Gastric cancer: current status of multimodality treatment].

BACKGROUND: The overall prognosis of gastric cancer with an overall 5-year survival of 25% is still poor despite improvements of the surgical and perioperative procedures. To improve the surgical treatment results other therapeutic options as chemo- and/or radiotherapy have been investigated for more than 20 years. METHODS: After a literature review, the results of actual trials of multimodality treatment were analysed and described. RESULTS: Adjuvant treatment was less effective compared with neoadjuvant or perioperative chemotherapy performed in advanced tumour categories T3/4. Actual trials could show that the rate of curative (R0) resection can be augmented resulting in an increase of the overall 5-year survival rate of more than 10 %. CONCLUSION: To confirm this trend, further studies with high pathological and surgical quality control are necessary as well as a more exact definition of prediction and evaluation of the response following chemotherapy.