Introduction & Objective: Gastric Cancer (GC) is one of the most common causes of death in the world. The most important cause of high death rate related to GC is late diagnosis of the disease. The main treatment of gastric cancer in its primary stage of is surgery, and radiotherapy and chemotherapy are supplementary treatments. There are some factors that affect survival after surgery. This study aimed to assess the survival of patients with GC under surgery and to determine the risk factors of this cancer.

Materials & Methods: A total of 262 patients with GC under surgery were followed and included in the study from 21st of March 2003 to 21st of March 2007 in the cancer institute of Tehran, Imam Khomeini Hospital, . The staging of the disease before the surgery was based on CT-Scan and endosonography and after the surgery was based on the pathologic reports. The survival of the patients was determined by their periodical referrals and our telephone contacts with their relatives. The survival times were considered as the time from the diagnosis up to the death or the end of the study. The effect of the various risk factors including gender, age at diagnosis, tumor site, pathologic stage of the disease, type of treatment, metastases and relapse were evaluated. Kaplan-Miere approach was used to estimate survival and Log-rank test and proportional Cox model to evaluate the related factors. Data were analyzed using Spss16 statistical software.

Results: 75.2% of patients were men and 34.4% cases of patients experienced death. The mean follow-up time was 19.3±17.4. The mean age at diagnosis was 58±11.5 and survival mean and median were 49 and 27 months respectively. The one, three and five year survival of the patients were 0.85, 0.41 and 0.3 respectively. Gender, pathologic stage, age at diagnosis and weight-loss were significantly related to the survival in multivariate analysis.

Conclusion: The diagnosis of the cancer in primary stages causes timely treatment and this in turn decreases the unpleasant outcomes of delayed diagnosis.