Biological impact of skip metastasis in patients with gastrointestinal cancers undergoing sentinel lymph node mapping.

499 Background: As in melanoma and breast cancers, sentinel lymph node (SLN) mapping has been successfully used in gastrointestinal (GI) cancers (Ca) for accurate nodal staging. However, due to variable incidence of skip metastasis between different parts of the GI tract, its usefulness has been questioned for the proper staging. Hence, we aimed to evaluate the rates of skip mets, its mechanism and its biological impact in GICa. Methods: A search of English literature was performed incorporating MEDLINE and Cochrane library database using the following terms: skip metastasis, sentinel node, colorectal, gastric, and esophageal cancer. The following were excluded: comments, case reports, reviews, fewer than 40 patients in the study. The remaining were used for data extraction. Results: Between 2000-2009, 27 studies including 3,589 patients (122 esophageal, 1,185 gastric, 2,113 colon, and 169 rectal cancers) were reviewed. The overall success rate of SLNM was 95% (96.6% in esophageal, 94% in gastric, 94.3% i...