AbstractBackgroundThere is no consensus regarding a better long‐term prognosis with laparoscopic gastrectomy than with open surgery in patients with advanced gastric cancer, especially in patients with T3 or more advanced gastric cancer. We investigated the impact of laparoscopic gastrectomy on the long‐term prognosis of patients who underwent radical gastrectomy for primary T3 or more advanced gastric cancer.MethodsThis single‐center, retrospective cohort study included 294 consecutive patients who underwent radical gastrectomy for primary T3 or more advanced gastric cancer from April 2008 through April 2017. We compared overall survival between laparoscopic and open surgery, using propensity score matching to adjust for baseline characteristics. We also investigated prognostic factors for overall survival by a forward stepwise procedure of Cox proportional hazards regression for multivariate analysis.ResultsThere were 136 (46.3%) and 158 (53.7%) patients in the laparoscopy and open groups, respectively. The median follow‐up period was 39 mo. After matching, there were 97 patients in each group, with no significant differences in background characteristics. After matching, the overall survival was significantly worse in the open group than in the laparoscopy group (P <0.001). Multivariate analyses also showed that open surgery was an independent poor prognostic factor for overall survival (hazard ratio: 2.160, 95% concordance interval: 1.365–3.419,P =0.001).ConclusionOverall survival may be better with laparoscopic gastrectomy than with open surgery for patients with primary T3 or more advanced gastric cancer.