Gastric intestinal metaplasia and early gastric cancer in the west: a changing paradigm

Gastric cancer remains the fifth leading cancer diagnosis worldwide, and it is the third leading cause of cancer-related mortality. The incidence of gastric cancer within the United States, however, has remained substantially lower than elsewhere, which has led to a lack of screening and surveillance in clinical practice. Patients with known premalignant lesions, such as gastric intestinal metaplasia, which can increase the risk of gastric cancer by as much as 6-fold, might benefit from surveillance guidelines to detect gastric cancer at an earlier, potentially curative stage. Chro-moendoscopy with optical magnification, narrow-band imaging, and other image-enhanced endoscopic techniques are commercially available to assist in the diagnosis of premalignant gastric lesions and early gastric cancer. Furthermore, endoscopic mucosal resection and endoscopic submucosal dissection have become more widely available and offer potentially curative endoscopic resection for dysplastic lesions of the stomach and early gastric cancers, which is an alternative to traditional surgical resection.