Preoperative chemoradiation therapy induces primary-tumor complete response more frequently than chemotherapy alone in gastric cancer: analyses of the National Cancer Database 2006–2014 using propensity score matching

Background The benefit of preoperative chemoradiation (CXRT) over preoperative chemotherapy alone (“chemotherapy” hereafter) is unknown. By analyzing the National Cancer Database (NCDB), we investigated whether preoperative CXRT improves the incidence of primary tumor pathologic complete response (ypT0) and overall survival (OS) compared with preoperative chemotherapy in patients with gastric cancer.