Management of gastric neuro-endocrine tumours in a large French national cohort (GTE)

Gastric neuro-endocrine tumours are rare. European guidelines for the management of neuro-endocrine tumours have been published in 2012. The aim of our survey was to study the management of gastric neuro-endocrine tumours registered in the national cohort. A prospective national cohort registers the Neuro-endocrine tumours in France since January 2003 (GTE network). We reviewed all the individual medical reports of gastric neuro-endocrine tumours in order to collect data on treatment.

One hundred and ninety seven gastric neuro-endocrine tumours diagnosed between 1964 and 2013 in 20 centres were registered. For 181 cases data were considered complete for our survey. Eighty four tumours were type 1 (46.4%); five types 2 (2.8%); 52 types 3 (28.7%) and 40 types 4 (22.1%). Types 1 and 2 were first endoscopically managed in 93 and 60% of cases, respectively, whereas surgery was first done in 45 and 42%, respectively, of types 3 and 4. Systemic treatment, chemotherapy and/or somatostatin analogue, was first administered exclusively for types 3 and 4. Near 3% of types 1 and 40% of types 2 received at a time somatostatin analogue treatment. Five-year survival rates were 98.3, 100, 63.2 and 31.8% for types 1, 2, 3 and 4, respectively.

The great majority of gastric neuro-endocrine tumours registered in this national cohort are treated in accordance with the current guidelines. The survival rates we reported must be interpreted with caution, because this cohort registered preferentially selected patients eligible for treatment. The registration of all the gastric neuro-endocrine tumours, in particular type 1 considered as benign and type 4 not eligible for specific anti-cancer treatment must be encouraged.