The JMIR Public Health and Surveillance article Survival Rate of Gastric Cancer Patients in Jordan: Secondary Data Analysis examines survival among gastric cancer patients registered in Jordan between 2010 and 2014. Published on 4 May 2020, it uses Jordan Cancer Registry data to assess five-year survival and the influence of age, cancer stage, tumor differentiation and treatment.
Key Insights
The overall five-year survival rate among Jordanian gastric cancer patients was 37.7%, with a median survival of 1.48 years.
Survival declined with age, from 43% among patients under 40 to 29.8% among those aged 70 or older.
Cancer stage strongly affected survival: five-year survival was 75% for localized disease, 48% for regional disease and 22.7% for distant metastasis.
Tumor differentiation was also important. Survival fell from 89% for well-differentiated tumors to 32% for poorly differentiated tumors.
Figure 1 on page 3 shows a sharp decline in survival during the first years after diagnosis, from about 57% initially to around 37% by year five.
Multivariate analysis identified age, nationality, tumor grade and stage as significant predictors of mortality. Distant-stage disease had a 5.65-times higher hazard of death than localized disease.
The study emphasizes earlier diagnosis and improved screening, since patients diagnosed while the cancer was localized had substantially better survival.
A methodological inconsistency appears in the paper: the methods state that only Jordanian cases were included, while the results analyze 1,388 cases, of whom only 872 were Jordanian, and compare survival between Jordanian and non-Jordanian patients. The authors also caution that the unusually high 93.5% survival among non-Jordanians may reflect shorter follow-up.
