Is the metastatic lymph node ratio can predict the survival rate in gastric cancer patients?
Previous studies have proven that the MLR is an excellent predictor for survival outcome in patients with colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, breast cancer and other carcinomas. Some related studies on gastric cancer also found the potential of the MLR on prognostic evaluation. However, there is no consensus on MLR stratification cutoffs for lymph node staging, especially a lack of data for advanced gastric cancer located in the cardia and fundus. A research article to be published on July 21, 2008 of the World Journal of Gastroenterology addresses this question. In this study, two hundred and 36 patients with advanced gastric cancer located in the cardia and fundus were analyzed retrospectively. As some researches revealed the correlation between MLR and survival by deviding the MLR into three or four different categories, this article made further step to investigate the prognostic impact of the MLR by setting up a regression model besides survival analysis. The MLR can reflect the exte
