Vessel invasion is a risk factor for gastric cancer: a retrospective analysis study

Abstract Objective To explore the relationship between vessel invasion (VI) and clinicopathological features and prognosis in patients with gastric cancer (GC). Methods A total of 3600 cases of patients with GC who underwent radical gastrectomy in gastrointestinal surgery department of the First Affiliated Hospital of Naval Medical University from June 2014 to June 2019 were retrospectively analyzed, and filtering them based on specific inclusion and exclusion criteria. To reduce the possibility of selection bias about the impact of VI, patients were divided into two groups according to the presence or absence of it, and performed a one-to-one propensity score matching (PSM), resulting in 724 patients in each group. In the analysis of data from 3,205 GC patients was employed to examine inter-group variations in VI positivity across diverse clinicopathological factors. Both univariate and multivariate Cox regression models were applied to investigate the correlation between clinicopathological factors and prognosis. The findings were further illustrated through the plotting of Kaplan-Meier survival curves. Results 3205 patients were included in this study, of which 989 (30.9%) were VI-positive and 2216 (69.1%) were VI-negative. VI-positive group was found to be significantly associated with age, body mass index (BMI), pTNM stage, tumor location, perineural invasion (PI), Lauren classfication and tumor deposit (TD) (P