Patient access to perioperative chemotherapy with fluorouracil, leucovorin, oxaliplatin and docetaxel in patients with resectable gastric cancer in the Netherlands

The FLOT4 trial demonstrated superior survival of perioperative chemotherapy with 5-fluorouracil, oxaliplatin, and docetaxel (FLOT) compared to anthracycline triplets for resectable gastric cancer. These results were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) congress in June 2017 and published in April 2019. However, adoption of novel treatments in clinical practice often encounters delays. This study assesses the patterns of perioperative chemotherapy utilization and FLOT uptake in clinical practice within the Netherlands. A retrospective cohort study was conducted with resectable gastric cancer patients (cT1–4a,XcNallcM0) between 2015–2020 from the Netherlands Cancer Registry. Descriptive statistics, Cochran-Armitage tests, Fisher's exact or unpaired T-tests, and Jonckheere-Terpstra tests were used to analyze chemotherapy trends and FLOT uptake across hospitals. Among 3290 included patients, 42.9 % received neoadjuvant treatment. In 2015, 43.6 % of patients received perioperative chemotherapy versus 43.5 % in 2020 (p = 0.63). 40 out of 62 hospitals (64.5 %) adopted FLOT between the ASCO presentation and the full publication. FLOT increased from 42.9 % before publication to 86.8 % after publication (p