Original Guideline
MEDLINE (1966 to January 2002), CANCERLIT (1983 to October 2001), and the Cochrane Library (Issue 1, 2002) databases were searched with no language restrictions. "Stomach neoplasms" (Medical subject heading [MeSH]) and the text word "gastric cancer" were combined with "chemotherapy, adjuvant" (MeSH), "radiotherapy, adjuvant" (MeSH), "immunotherapy" (MeSH), and the following phrases used as text words: "preoperative or neoadjuvant," "chemotherapy," "radiotherapy," "radiation therapy," "irradiation," "immunotherapy," "chemoimmunotherapy," "immunochemotherapy," "immunoradiotherapy," and "radioimmunotherapy." These terms were then combined with the search terms for the following study designs and publication types: practice guidelines, meta-analyses, and randomized controlled trials. In addition, the Physician Data Query (PDQ) clinical trials database on the Internet, and the proceedings of the 1996 to 2001 annual meetings of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the 1999 to 2001 annual meetings of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (ASTRO) were searched for reports of new or ongoing trials. Relevant articles and abstracts were selected and reviewed by one reviewer and the reference lists from these sources were searched for additional trials.
2003 Update
The original literature search has been updated using the MEDLINE database (February 2002 through April 2003) and the Cochrane Library database of Systematic Reviews (Issue 1, 2003). Due to the U.S. National Library of Medicine's decision to no longer update the CANCERLIT database in April 2003, the Gastrointestinal Cancer DSG will not be searching this database for future updates. The 2002 proceedings of American Society of Clinical Oncology and American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology were also searched for relevant abstracts. In addition, the Physician Data Query (PDQ) clinical trials database was searched for relevant trials.
Inclusion Criteria
Articles were selected for inclusion in this overview of the evidence if they were fully published reports or published abstracts of randomized trials or systematic overviews of randomized trials of adjuvant or neoadjuvant treatments compared with "curative" surgery alone in patients with resectable gastric cancer. Data on overall survival had to be reported. Other outcomes of interest were disease-free survival and adverse effects.