Introduction: Proactive palliative care can effectively relieve symptoms early and effectively as well as improve the quality of life of patients with gastric adenocarcinoma (GAC).
Areas covered: The review summarizes palliative care for GAC. GAC caused specific symptoms, such as malignant gastric outlet obstruction (GOO), bleeding, weight loss, and/or ascites, therefore, these symptoms must be addressed specifically.
Expert opinion: Palliative care should start early to control general symptoms, thus may improve the patient's condition to make the patient eligible for anti-cancer treatment. As some stage IV GAC patients can now live longer, palliative interventions become more important. A multimodality interdisciplinary approach is strongly encouraged.
Keywords: Gastric adenocarcinoma; malignant gastric outlet obstruction; palliative care; palliative gastrectomy; palliative radiotherapy.