Search

Honggang Cheng,1 Aixia Sun,2 Qingbo Guo,3 Yucai Zhang4 1Department of Gastroenterological Surgery, Liaocheng People’s Hospital, Liaocheng Clinical School of Taishan Medical University, Liaocheng 252000, Shandong Province, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Clinical Laboratory, Liaocheng People’s Hospital, Liaocheng Clinical School of Taishan Medical University, Liaocheng 252000, Shandong Province, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Clinical Laboratory, Yidu Central Hospital of Weifang, Qingzhou 262500, Shandong Province, People’s Republic of China; 4Department of Health, Liaocheng People’s Hospital of Taishan Medical University, Liaocheng 252000, Shandong Province, People’s Republic of China Objective: To systematically evaluate the efficacy and safety of the combination of apatinib targeted therapy and chemotherapy (CT) in the treatment of patients with advanced gastric cancer (GC). Materials and methods: Clinical trials were extracted from PubMed, the Cochrane Library, Web of Science, EMBASE, CNKI, and the Wanfang database. Outcome measures, including therapeutic efficacy, quality of life (QOL), and adverse events, were extracted and evaluated. Results: Nineteen trials, including 1,256 advanced GC patients, were included. The results indicated that, compared with CT alone, the combination of apatinib targeted therapy with CT significantly improved the patients’ complete response rate (OR=1.85, 95% CI=1.04–3.28, P=0.04), partial response rate (OR=2.19, 95% CI=1.71–2.80, P0.05). Conclusion: The combination of apatinib targeted therapy and CT is more effective for GC treatment than CT alone. However, this combined treatment could lead to greater rates of hypertension, albuminuria, and hand–foot syndrome. Therefore, the benefits and risks should be considered before treatment. Keywords: apatinib, target therapy, chemotherapy, gastric cancer, meta-analysis