How long can you live with stage IV gastric cancer?

The survival period of patients with stage IV gastric cancer is usually very short, less than 10% of patients can survive for five years, and most of them can die within one to three years. Stage IV gastric cancer usually means that the cancer has metastasized throughout the body, most commonly in liver, lung, abdominal cavity, peritoneum, etc. Patients usually have a large amount of fluid in the abdominal cavity, and have difficulty in eating and are very thin, so their bodies are extremely weak and even cachectic at this time. Therefore, most of the patients will not survive more than one year. A few patients with good physical condition can tolerate immunotherapy, targeted therapy and other anti-tumor treatments, and their condition can be temporarily controlled. However, due to the large load of tumor cells in the patient’s body, the emergence of relapse resistance is usually inevitable, and once relapse occurs, there are few effective salvage treatments. The survival period of this group of patients will not exceed five years, usually only two to three years. Therefore, to improve the survival of gastric cancer patients, early detection, early diagnosis and early treatment are still the key.