[Our experience with early gastric cancer]

Gastric cancer has always required surgical therapy since in the majority of cases at the moment of treatment symptoms are already at an advances stage. Over the past years many advances have been made in the early diagnosis of many forms of neoplasia, but the rate of progress has been much slower with regard to gastric cancer. Only the preventive and regular use of gastroscopy will allow the disease to be diagnosed at a non-advanced stage. The term early gastric cancer is used to describe a carcinoma which only infiltrates the mucosa, or the mucosa and submucosa, irrespective of lymph node or other metastases. The present study was based on a retrospective analysis of cases of stomach cancer observed in the Surgical Department of the University of Perugia from January 1963 to December 1988. A total of 1,263 patients were affected by cancer of the stomach during the above period. One hundred and twenty-three cases were not included because of incomplete data or insufficient follow-up. A total of 1,140 patients were therefore included in the study; of these only 99 cases were affected by early gastric cancer. Age, sex, earlier gastric diseases, life styles, familial occurrence of disease, and symptomatology were among the different parameters evaluated. In addition, the site of disease, diagnostic methods, pre- and post-operative staging, intramural diffusion of the disease and surgical treatment were taken into account. In older cases the 5-year survival rate was calculated, whereas in more recent cases statistical methods, based on accumulated data, were used to estimate survival rates.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)