Upper gastrointestinal bleeding due to benign tumours of the stomach

Benign tumours of the stomach are usually asymptomatic and are discovered incidentally during radiology, endoscopy or pathological examination. In some cases, however, these tumours produce overt clinical symptoms. The authors report eight patients with significant upper gastrointestinal bleeding due to benign gastric tumours, who required surgical resection of their lesion. Histologically, the growths proved to be leiomyoma in five cases, polyps in two and lipoma in one. Surgical treatment consisted in local excision in three patients and subtotal gastrectomy in five patients. Bleeding was stopped in all cases and there was no operative mortality.