The effect of CEA/Albumin ratio in gastric cancer patient on prognostic factors

Aim: Gastric cancer is an important disease worldwide with high mortality and morbidity rates. Novel targeted treatment approaches and recent improvements in immunotherapy have significantly improved survival. New indicators that can help determine the prognosis of stomach cancer have been of interest to researchers. We evaluated and recorded the patients' final preoperative CEA/albumin ratios and investigated the effect of this ratio on lymph node involvement, pathological tumor stage, and overall survival. MATERIAL AND METHOD: We retrospectively evaluated data from electronic files of patients who were operated for stomach cancer in our center between January 2012 and December 2017. The study included 195 patients who were followed up regularly and whose complete medical data were available. RESULTS: The effect of CEA/Albumin ratio on the number of Metastatic Lymph Nodes was analyzed using Linear Regression and was found to be statistically significant (p = 0.001). One unit increase in CEA/Albumin ratio increases the number of Metastatic Lymph Nodes by 0.223 (Confidence Interval: 0.097-0.380) units, and this variable alone explains 5.7% of the change in the number of Metastatic Lymph Nodes. CONCLUSION: Neoadjuvant treatment decisions can be made by estimating the T and N stages by using CEA/albumin ratio in cases where conventional radiological methods are insufficient.