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Surgical resection is the only potentially curative option for patients with stomach cancer. To determine factors that predict patient outcomes after resection for gastric cancer, researchers evaluated data (collected from 1998 through 2003) on 13,354 patients in the Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS), which is the largest all-payer inpatient database in the U.S.
Overall, the in-hospital mortality rate among patients who underwent gastrectomy was 6.0%. The investigators found that a higher annual surgical volume (>11 cases) at a single hospital predicted lower in-hospital mortality; gastric cancer patients who underwent surgery at higher-volume centers had better outcomes. Significant factors that predicted in-hospital mortality included low …