Cochrane

Background The pancreas is a digestive gland situated in the upper abdomen, which is also vital to normal control of blood sugar. Pancreatic cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer death in industrialized nations. The standard surgical treatment for cancer of the head of the gland and precancerous abnormalities is partial removal of the pancreas, ...

Review question Does molecular-targeted therapy (a type of treatment specifically targeting cancer cells) benefit people with late-stage stomach cancer? Background Due to the lack of clinical symptoms, many stomach cancers are diagnosed at a very late stage (stage III or stage IV), for which surgery cannot be the best option anymore. The effects ...

Review question Is laparoscopic treatment (key hole surgery) equivalent to open surgical treatment for treatment of people with gastric (stomach) cancer? Background Stomach cancer is the third most frequent cause of cancer-related death in the world. If cancer has not spread to other areas of the body, and if the person can withstand a major operation, ...

Review question Does more extended lymphadenectomy lead to a survival advantage for patients undergoing surgery for gastric carcinoma? Background Gastric carcinoma is a leading cause of cancer death worldwide. For patients affected with this disease, the main therapy is surgery, which consists of gastric resection along with the removal of lymph ...

Review question Whether testing healthy people for Helicobacter pylori and treating those infected routinely with a course of antibiotics decreases the number of new cases of gastric cancer. Background People with H. pylori infection are more likely to develop gastric cancer than people who are not infected with the bacterium. For this reason, ...

Review question There is much debate on the diagnostic performance of endoscopic ultrasound (EUS) in the preoperative staging of gastric cancer. The aim of this review was to collect the available evidence and then to calculate how well EUS stages stomach cancer. Background EUS is a diagnostic test that can be used to determine how far (stage) cancer ...

Review question Does long-term proton pump inhibitor (PPI) use increase the risk of having pre-cancerous lesions (changes in the stomach lining that are not cancer but could become cancerous over time) in the stomach? Background PPIs are the most effective drugs used to reduce gastric acid secretion (called antacids) and they are commonly prescribed ...

We tried to see if there was enough evidence to support the idea of following up patients with precancerous conditions of the stomach to prevent cancer. This would usually be done by means of an examination of the patient's stomach with a camera inserted via the mouth (an endoscopy) and the removal of small samples of tissue from the stomach (biopsy). ...

Stomach cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide. Surgery is the only curative treatment offered to patients suffering from this cancer. Survival rates, however, are still poor. Chemotherapy given after surgery has been developed in order to improve these results. We identified 34 trials with 7824 patients which randomised ...

This systematic review uses the data of individual patients from eight and published data from another six randomized controlled trials. We found that the administration of chemotherapy before surgery leads to longer survival in patients with adenocarcinoma of the esophagus, the junction between esophagus and stomach, and the stomach. The findings suggest ...