Evaluation of the efficiency and safety of combined chemotherapy and molecular-targeted therapy in the treatment of advanced gastric cancer: A protocol for systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: Gastric cancer is considered to be the sixth prevalent cancer and the third widespread trigger of cancer-associated deaths globally. One of the major method of treating this harmful condition is completely resecting the entire tumor. Standard treatment procedures, including radiotherapy, surgery, and chemotherapy are ineffective for patients with advanced gastric cancer (AGC), mainly because the predictions are deficient. Many studies have recently sought to examine the effect of combining chemotherapy and molecular-targeted therapy, supposing that such developments could become effective for treating AGC. Still, the advantages of combining chemotherapy plus molecular-targeted therapy to treat advanced gastric cancer appear to be unconvincing. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: We intend to perform an electronic search using information obtained from PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, ScienceDirect, Web of Science, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, and WanFang databases. Specifically, we will consider all randomized controlled trials published in English or Chinese, and focus only on those assessing the effectiveness and safety of a MIC of chemotherapy and molecular-targeted therapy to treat AGC. Furthermore, two independent authors will conduct data extraction as well as explore the risk of bias. Furthermore, we intend to use the odds ratio for dichotomous data, mean differences or standardized mean differences for continuous data, along with hazard ratio for time-to-event data, with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Because of the nature of this study, we will not require ethical approval. Instead, we will report the review reported in a peer-reviewed journal.