Gastric cancer surgery should strive for standardization

Surgery is one of the effective ways to treat gastric cancer. However, when surgeons perform surgery on gastric cancer patients, they must not only remove the cancerous tumor, but also thoroughly clear the lymph node tissue around the stomach.

Take Japan, one of the countries with a high incidence of digestive tract malignancies, for example. Their cure rate for digestive tract malignancies is significantly higher than that of other countries. One of the important reasons is that this country has implemented "standardized and normalized" treatment for all patients undergoing radical gastric cancer surgery. That is, when surgeons perform surgery on patients, their task is not only to remove the cancerous tumor, but also to thoroughly clean the lymph nodes around the stomach. The implementation of such "standard surgery" is a guarantee for the patient's recovery and can significantly improve the patient's 5-year survival rate after surgery.

However, compared with traditional surgery, lymph node dissection during gastric cancer surgery is more difficult and time-consuming. This is because lymph node dissection often involves multiple important blood vessels and tissues of multiple organs. It is necessary to avoid damage to the blood vessels and to remove the lymph nodes and other tissues around the blood vessels. The operation is difficult and time-consuming, and requires higher skills from the surgeon. The slightest carelessness will lead to failure of the operation, and the risks that doctors have to bear are also rising sharply. However, at present, scientific and unified standards and norms have not been established for the surgical treatment of digestive tract malignancies in China. In addition, some surgeons have a "fear of difficulty" mentality, which leads to the inability to widely carry out standardized lymph node dissection. This is also an important reason for the high mortality rate after gastric cancer surgery in my country.