[Surgical treatment of malignant small bowel neoplasms--report on four cases]

About 0.3% of all malignancies and 2% of gastrointestinal tumours are malignant small bowel tumours. Many of these tumours are diagnosed during emergency surgery because of severe bleeding or acute intestinal obstruction. Planned surgical intervention if early and appropriate morphological and histological diagnosis is available offers lower short term complication rate and results in better longterm prognosis. We present the history of four patients operated on for malignant small bowel lesions between 1998 and 2002. We describe the possibilities and difficulties of diagnosis and surgical treatment of these rare gastrointestinal tumours.