Laparoscopic Gastrectomy

This study aims to compare the effects of using prophylactic abdominal drainage tubes during Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) in patients undergoing Laparoscopic Distal Gastrectomy (LDG) for gastric cancer through a multicenter non-inferiority randomized trial. The study is divided into two groups: 1. ERAS-tubeless group: The ERAS protocol without nasogastric decompression, nasojejunal feeding or prophylactic abdominal drainage tubes. 2. ERAS-tube group: the ERAS protocol with prophylactic abdominal drainage tubes, along with no nasogastric decompression or nasojejunal feeding tubes. Patients will be randomly assigned to the two groups in a 1:1 ratio, with the primary analysis based on the modified intention-to-treat population (mITT) and secondary analysis on the per-protocol (PP) population. Perioperative management will adhere to ERAS guidelines, and postoperative quality of life will be assessed using the EORTC QLQ-C30 questionnaire and QoR-15 scores. Preliminary training on the standard ERAS protocol is administered to all members in the team before the initiation of the study, ensuring in-group members to fully master the requirements and other related contents in the study. Data collectors, analysts, and outcome evaluators will remain blinded to group allocation. The findings of this study are expected to provide high-quality evidence on the feasibility of omitting prophylactic abdominal drainage in the context of ERAS, thereby contributing to the optimization of postoperative management strategies for gastric cancer surgery.

Gastric cancer is a frequent neoplasm in the world, presenting more than one million new cases and around 768,000 deaths in the data registered in 2020. Among the therapeutic options for gastric cancer, surgery is an essential pillar for its treatment. Gastric cancer surgery consists of gastric resection with negative margins and radical lymphadenectomy in patients without distant metastases. It has been demonstrated over the years that radical lymphadenectomy in gastric cancer allows for adequate staging and improved long-term survival. In order to perform a correct staging using the TNM system, it is necessary to resect at least 15 lymph nodes in the radical lymphadenectomy. For radical lymphadenectomy staging, the Japanese Gastric Cancer Association defined and subdivided nodal stations. Three types of lymphadenectomy are described according to oncologic gastric resections (D1, D1+ and D2), with D2 lymphadenectomy being the standard of treatment for locally advanced gastric tumors. Performing an insufficient or inadequate lymphadenectomy has been shown to negatively impact survival after gastrectomy in such a cohort. The development of technology based on fluorescence guided by indocyanine green could improve the technique and results of D2 lymphadenectomy in patients with gastric cancer. There is evidence that the application of ICG in D2 lymphadenectomy increases the number of resected nodes, however, studies of higher scientific quality (randomized clinical trials) are needed. Furthermore, most studies in this field have focused on Eastern countries (Japan, Korea and China), where the percentage of early tumors and chemotherapy treatment is different from Western centers. Therefore, we propose a multicenter randomized clinical trial aimed at evaluating whether the application of ICG-guided fluorescence-based technology in D2 lymphadenectomy of locally advanced gastric cancer increases the number of resected nodes, improves the oncologic quality of the lymphadenectomy, and thus may increase overall survival and disease-free survival at 2 and 5 years postoperatively.