Cutaneous metastasis from gastric cancer: the manifestation, diagnosis, treatment and prognosis

Abstract

Background Cutaneous metastasis from gastric cancer is very rare. The understanding of this disease is fragmentary. It is still unclear about its clinical manifestation of cutaneous metastasis from gastric cancer. This situation delayed diagnosis and treatment, followed by poor prognosis. Here we firstly report a case–cohort study based on network to improve the diagnosis, treatment and prognosis. Methods A comprehensive search of PubMed was performed. All studies on cutaneous metastasis from gastric cancer were collected. The publication date was limited from 2000 to the present, and the language was limited to English. SPSS 26.0 was employed for statistical analysis. Results Seventy-two cases were included. The average patient age was 60.0 ± 16.0 years old. In total, 72.2% of the patients were male. The most common manifestation was nodular skin lesions (45.8%). The metastases always presented as multiple lesions (61.1%). The most common metastasis location was the thoracoabdominal wall (56.9%). A total of 64.7% of the patients simultaneously had extracutaneous metastases. Most of the tumors were poorly differentiated carcinoma (87.5%), and 66.1% had signet ring cell. A total of 40.8% of the cutaneous metastases presented as primary manifestations. Only 9.6% had their diagnosis as soon as the cutaneous metastasis emerged. Systemic chemotherapy (65.6%) was the most common treatment strategy, followed by radical surgery (12.5%). The median overall survival was only 6 months. The median overall survival of 5 patients with resected tumors was 48 months (chi2 = 10.574; P = 0.001). Conclusion Cutaneous metastasis from gastric cancer usually manifests as an emerged nodule or erysipelas-like skin lesion. Resection of the cutaneous lesion could be helpful to those with local metastases.