More clinical information is needed to make treatment recommendations.
Metastatic gastric cancer is an incurable disease with a median survival of 6 to 8 months. The limited response to currently available chemotherapy agents has spurred an understandable nihilism in the treatment of this disease. However, recent studies comparing the relative efficacy and toxicity of various chemotherapy regimens indicate a modest gain in the palliative treatment of gastric cancer. The data are less clear, however, on the optimal chemotherapy regimen. Researchers from the Mayo Clinic, however, recently found no difference in survival when comparing single-agent fluorouracil with more toxic fluorouracil combination therapies, including regimens with cisplatin and doxorubicin.