Anatomic and pathological aspects in the pathology of malignant gastric tumors

Efforts in perfecting the methods of early diagnosis, in trying to assess premalignant conditions, and in properly staging malignant tumors are still in trend. The geographic area around Timişoara (Banat Region) is situated on the first place in the country as far as the gastric location of cancer is concerned. The authors aimed to deal with the initial stage in the development of gastric cancer, a stage which has been oncologically termed "precancerous damage", and with the neoplastic invasion of the gastric wall. The present paper is based on the 1995-2005 statistics of the IInd Surgical Department of the Timişoara County Hospital, the study group consisting of 802 patients admitted for gastric disorders, 522 of which being later diagnosed with a tumoral pathology. Routine morphological tests were conducted on biopsy pieces dye stained with Hematoxylin-Eosin, standard technique, the van Gieson trichromic staining, the Giemsa staining, the AA-PAS staining and the immunoreaction methods. The age for gastric tumoral pathology ranged between 36-88 years in females, and 31-87 years in males. Most gastric carcinomas are adenocarcinoma, 404 (90%) cases--could be classified as follows: 167 cases of tubular adenocarcinoma; 39 cases of papillary adenocarcinoma; 24 cases of mucinous or colloid adenocarcinoma; 141 "signet ring"-cell carcinoma; 33 cases of undifferentiated carcinoma. Currently there is an increase of the incidence of the "diffuse"-type in women and at younger ages. Attention should be given to precancerous conditions; there was a large number of premalignant or potentially malignant gastric damage: atrophic chronic gastritis (54 cases), intestinal metaplasia (104 cases), and gastric dysplasia (104 cases).