Nutritional Care of Gastric Cancer Patients with Clinical Outcomes and Complications: A Review

The incidence and mortality of gastric cancer have been steadily decreased over the past few decades. However, gastric cancer is still one of the leading causes of cancer deaths across many regions of the world, particularly in Asian countries. In previous studies, nutrition has been considered one of significant risk factors in gastric cancer patients. Especially, malnourished patients are at greater risk of adverse clinical outcomes (e.g., longer hospital stay) and higher incidence of complications (e.g., wound/infectious complications) compared to well-nourished patients. Malnutrition is commonly found in advanced gastric cancer patients due to poor absorption of essential nutrients after surgery. Therefore, nutritional support protocols, such as early oral and enternal feeding, have been proposed in many studies, to improve unfavorable clinical outcomes and to reduce complications due to delayed application of oral nutritional support or parental feeding. Also, the supplied with enternal immune-enriched diet had more benefits in improving clinical outcomes and fewer complications compared to a group supplied with control formula. Using nutritional screening tools, such as nutritional risk index (NRI) and nutritional risk screening (NRS 2002), malnourished patients showed higher incidence of complications and lower survival rates than non-malnourished patients. However, a long-term nutritional intervention, such as nutritional counseling, was not effective in the patients. Therefore, early assessment of nutritional status in patients using a proper nutritional screening tool is suggested to prevent malnutrition and adverse health outcomes. Further studies with numerous ethnic groups may provide stronger scientific evidences in association between nutritional care and recovery from surgery in patients with gastric cancer.