Purpose: T1 gastric cancer (GC) with seven or more metastatic lymph nodes is extremely rare, and very few clinical studies have been conducted to evaluate the clinicopathological features of their recurrence.
Methods: We retrospectively analyzed the outcomes of T1 GC and T2-4 GC patients who had multiple nodal metastases after radical surgery from 2006 to 2020. Propensity score matching was performed to compare the two groups of patients.
Results: After propensity score matching, 18 of 22 patients in the T1 group and 36 of 144 patients in the T2-4 group were selected. Recurrence occurred in six patients (33.3%) in the T1 group. In the T1 group, the most common site of initial recurrence was bone (15.0%). The prevalence of bone recurrence was significantly higher in the T1 group than in the T2-4 group (P = 0.02). The median interval time between radical surgery and bone recurrence was 24 months, and the median survival time after bone recurrence was 14 months.
Conclusion: Bone recurrence was more frequently identified as an initial recurrence site in T1 GC cases with multiple metastases after radical surgery compared with that in T2-4 GC cases. Careful attention should be paid to postoperative bone recurrence in the long-term postoperative course of these patients.
Keywords: Bone recurrence; Multiple lymph node metastases; T1 gastric cancer.
© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.