[A case of small cell carcinoma of the stomach]

We report a case of small cell carcinoma of the stomach in a 60-year-old man. The patient was found to have a gastric tumor by routine upper gastrointestinal endoscopy for chronic gastrititis, and was admitted to the hospital. The patient underwent a curative distal gastrectomy with D2 lymph node dissection following a diagnosis of early gastric cancer at the posterior wall of the antrum, in June 2001. Surgical findings were T1, N1, P0, H0, M0, stage I b. The final pathological diagnosis was small cell carcinoma of the stomach with severe lymphatic and vascular invasion (INF alpha, sm, ly3 v2, n1 (+)). In a review of 47 cases seen in the Japanese literature, only 5 patients had early gastric cancer. Lymph node metastasis was observed in 95.0% of all cases, and liver metastasis in 41.0%. Four of the 5 patients with early gastric cancer (80.0%) had lymph node metastases. The prognosis was reported to be extremely poor because small cell carcinoma frequently metastasizes to lymph nodes and/or the liver even in an early stage. The chemotherapy selected by many hospitals is mainly CDDP, but the use of chemotherapeutic drugs varied from hospital to hospital and no effective chemotherapy for the disease has been established as yet.