Identification of patients at risk for poor survival among those with normal skeletal muscle mass: a multicenter retrospective validation study in gastric cancer.

Authors

Ryota Matsui, Kazuyoshi Yamamoto, Yoshiro Yukawa, Masayoshi Terayama, Yukinori Kurokawa, Daisuke Ichikawa, Yoshitomo Yanagimoto, Takashi Oshima, Souya Nunobe, Takashi Kamei, Hiroya Takeuchi, Yoshihiro Nabeya, Masaki Kaibori, Naoki Hiki, Hidetoshi Eguchi, Yuichiro Doki

Published in

Gastric cancer : official journal of the International Gastric Cancer Association and the Japanese Gastric Cancer Association. Jul 06, 2026. Epub Jul 06, 2026.

Abstract

Although a low skeletal muscle mass index (SMI) leads to poor overall survival (OS) after gastrectomy in patients with gastric cancer, the cutoff value that predicts long-term survival in patients with normal SMI remains unclear. This study aimed to determine the cutoff SMI value for predicting OS in patients with normal SMI.
This multicenter retrospective cohort study included patients with normal SMI who underwent radical gastrectomy for pStage I-III primary gastric cancer between January 2011 and December 2016. The patients were randomly divided at a 6:4 ratio into a training set, which examined the cutoff values for SMI, and a validation set, which validated the cutoff values. Patients were classified into high and low SMI groups according to the cutoff values. We compared OS between the high- and low-SMI groups using log-rank test and identified prognostic factors using Cox proportional hazards regression analysis.
Of the 2516 patients, 1389 (55.2%) and 1127 (44.8%) were classified into the training and validation sets. We examined the cutoff values of SMI, which were 44.3 cm²/m² for men and 37.6 cm²/m² for women. Both men and women in the low-SMI group had poorer OS than those in the high-SMI group. Multivariate analysis revealed that a low SMI was an independent adverse prognostic factor for OS (hazard ratio: 1.314, 95% confidence interval: 1.044-1.654, P = 0.020). These cutoff values were associated with lower cancer-specific survival.
Among patients with normal SMI, those with a lower SMI had poorer long-term survival after radical gastrectomy.

PMID:
42406291
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 06 Jul 2026.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Stats

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.