Background: The appropriate extent of lymphadenectomy on gastric cancer patients with positive peritoneal cytology (CY1) is uncertain. This study retrospectively compared overall survival (OS) after standard and limited lymphadenectomy. Patients and Methods: The medical records from four institutions from 2004 to 2018 were reviewed and data for 91 patients with CY1, but no other distant metastases, who underwent gastrectomy were analyzed. D2 or greater lymphadenectomy and less than D2 lymphadenectomy were performed in 51 and 40 patients, respectively. Results: Full cohort analyses showed that patients who underwent D2 or greater lymphadenectomy had better prognostic nutritional indices and more such patients received postoperative chemotherapy. The OS in the group treated with D2 or greater lymphadenectomy was also significantly better (p=0.045). Twenty-seven pairs of patients were generated via propensity score matching, and analysis of their OS showed no significant difference between the groups according to lymphadenectomy (p=0.61). Conclusion: The extent of lymphadenectomy may not affect the prognoses for patients with CY1 gastric cancer.Gastric cancer was estimated to be the fourth most common cause of cancer death worldwide, behind lung, liver, and colorectal cancer, in 2016 (1). Although early gastric cancer can be cured by endoscopic resection or surgery, the prognosis of advanced gastric cancer with distant metastases is still poor. The presence of free cancer cells in the abdominal cavity, which can be determined by peritoneal lavage cytology from the pouch of Douglas during surgery, is classified as CY1 in the Japanese classification of gastric carcinoma (2), is included in distant metastasis, and is categorized as stage IV in both the Japanese classification and the International Union Against Cancer TNM classification (3). In the Japanese gastric cancer registry in 2010 (4), the 5-year overall survival (OS) rates for patients with CY0 and CY1 gastric cancer were 66.2% and 13.1%, respectively.The CCOG0301 study, a phase II study of radical surgery followed by postoperative chemotherapy with S-1 for CY1 gastric cancer, showed excellent outcomes with a median survival time (MST) of 23.1 months and a 5-year survival rate of 26% (5). In that study, gastrectomy was performed with D2 lymphadenectomy. Since that study, radical gastrectomy with D2 lymphadenectomy has been recognized as a standard therapy for CY1 gastric cancer without other distant metastases. However, in clinical practice, limited lymphadenectomy of D1+, D1, or D0 has often been performed for CY1 gastric cancer (6, 7). Because recurrences after radical gastrectomy in patients with CY1 disease were most frequently found in the peritoneum (8), radical lymphadenectomy did not seem to be associated with survival benefit. D1+ or lesser lymphadenectomy may be appropriate for CY1 gastric cancer (6). However, the optimal lymphadenectomy for CY1 gastric cancer has not yet been clarified.In this study, we hypothesized that limited lymphadenectomy was ...