Impact of Widths After Gastric Tube Reconstruction on Quality of Life for Patients With Esophagogastric Cancers

With the decreasing prevalence of gastric cancer, the incidence of cancer of the esophagogastric junction has rapidly risen in recent three decades, especially in North America and Europe. Despite the use of chemotherapy, its 5-year survival rate is still low (less than 30%) for cancer of the esophagogastric junction. Surgery still remains the optimum therapy for cancer of the esophagogastric junction. For Siewert's type II and III cancer, esophagojejunostomy after total gastrectomy and Roux-en-Y gastrojejunostomy after subtotal gastrectomy are regarded as the two main surgical approaches. For quality of life, no prospective trial provides evidence comparing the two approaches.

With a complete clearance of lymph nodes, esophagojejunostomy after total gastrectomy brings high 5-year survival rate, and can decrease the rate of local recurrence. However, due to the whole gastrectomy, the patients often represent bile regurgitation which may induce pulmonary infection, regurgitation asthma and weight loss.

Roux-en-Y gastrojejunostomy after subtotal gastrectomy reserve partial gastric body which was reconstructed into gastric tube. The remaining gastric body still peristalses and functions as well as a stomach. At the same time, the remaining gastric body keeps acid-secreting function which may induce acid regurgitation after surgery.

For Roux-en-Y gastrojejunostomy after subtotal gastrectomy, the width of reconstruction gastric tube was a key factor to predicate prognosis, and it often ranges from 3 cm to 6 cm, without universal standard. Narrow gastric tube may lack enough blood supply, as a result, it increase the rate of anastomotic leakage. On the contrary, wide gastric tube takes up much thoracic capacity which may disturb the normal pulmonary and cardiovascular function. Tabira and his colleagues conduct a prospective trail that proves the width of gastric tube has no relevance to local blood supply, anastomotic leakage and postoperative nutrition, but the study lack enough patients which may increase bias. So, there is no reliable evidence to predict the quality of postoperative life.

The prospective trail recruits patients with of cancer of the esophagogastric junction. And eligible patients were assigned into three groups: total gastrostomy group (TG group), wide gastric tube group (WG group) and narrow gastric tube group (NG group). Quality of life include integrated questionnaire of QLQ-STO22 and QLQ-C30 and related symptom relief was assessed as primary endpoint. And local recurrence, disease free survival, metastatic rate, overall survival and short-term complication of surgery were also observed as secondary endpoints.