Laparoscopic Total Gastrectomy With Versus Without Bursectomy

Overview

Bursectomy is widely performed in open surgery for advanced gastric cancer in East Asia. However laparoscopic D2 radical total gastrectomy with complete bursectomy is difficult and rare performed. Herein, we conduct a single-centre randomized controlled trial to explore the safety and feasibility of totally laparoscopic D2 radical total gastrectomy using a left outside bursa omentalis approach for achieving complete bursectomy.

Although, the clinical value of bursectomy in addition to D2 lymphadenectomy in radical gastrectomy for curable gastric cancer is controversial. Data analysis of the nationwide registry of gastric cancer in Japanese revealed that 10.7% of patients with subserosal and serosal positive cancer developed peritoneal recurrence after radical gastrectomy. Some trials, although, indicated a biologically reasonable but statistically non-significant advantage to bursectomy. But for patients with posterior gastric wall trans-serosal disease, such micrometastases can constitute the seeds of later recurrence. The non-bursectomy showed worse overall survival. Early removal of micrometastases and cancer cells deposited might prove beneficial and a possible therapeutic effect. In any case, the authors reasonably concluded that bursectomy should not be abandoned at this time. The hypothesis that it might actually enhance survival should be entertained. In the past decades, Japanese, Korea, Chinese and even Turkey, surgeons have continued to performed bursectomy and lymph nodes dissection as the conventional open procedures for advanced gastric cancer. Lymph nodes dissection and bursectomy is routinely regarded as a standard surgical procedure during radical open gastrectomy for tumors penetrating the serosa of the posterior gastric wall. Complete bursectomy and lymphadenectomy in open radical gastrectomy may represents a formidable challenge to the best of surgeons and its influences on operative morbidity and mortality, but it can be also safely performed in high volume experience centers or by experienced surgeons with mortality rate of \<1% and morbidity rates around 14%. Generally speaking, bursectomy is incomplete without total gastrectomy. The concept of bursectomy mentioned above is always almost confined to removal of the local anterior membrane of the transverse mesocolon and pancreatic capsule and to open radical gastrectomy. With the generalization and development of laparoscopic technology, laparoscopic surgery for advanced gastric cancer as clinical study has extensively performed in Asia.The investigators take the lead in carrying out laparoscopic bursectomy and D2 radical gastrectomy by. Herein, the investigators conduct a single-centre randomized controlled trial to explore the safety and feasibility of totally laparoscopic D2 radical total gastrectomy using a left outside bursa omentalis approach for achieving complete bursectomy.