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Reuters Health • The Doctor's Channel Daily Newscast

Gender and age interact to affect gastric cancer prognosis

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Reuters Health • The Doctor's Channel Daily Newscast

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Older men and younger women fare worse with gastric cancer than patients in other gender and age groups, according to a report in the Archives of Surgery for November.

Dr. Sung-Soo Park, from Korea University College of Medicine, Seoul, and co-researchers hypothesized that the difference in disease outcomes is related to sex hormones and suggest that further studies be performed to confirm this.

The findings are based on a study of 1299 patients with gastric cancer who were seen at Korea University Medical Center from 1993 to 2000. The subjects included 175 (13.5%) aged 40 years or younger and 1124 (86.5%) older than 40.

Tumor differentiation differed significantly between the two age groups and yet in the overall analysis, the prognosis of younger and older patients was comparable.

The differences in survival did not emerge until the researchers divided the subjects by both age and gender. Younger men had the best 10-year survival at 62.5%, while older men had the worst at 44.6% (p = 0.03). Older and younger women had intermediate rates at 56.2% and 51.9%, respectively.

Multivariate analysis confirmed that tumor stage and gender were independent predictors of survival, the authors note.

“The present findings strongly suggest that a single age factor does not appear to be meaningful for epidemiologic evaluation of gastric carcinomas in regard to prognosis,” the authors conclude. Rather, gender must also be taken into account when predicting survival.

Reference:
Arch Surg 2008;143:1062-1067.

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