Follow up Studies of Early Carcinoma of the Stomach with Residual Carcinoma Cells in the Surgical Margins

Osamu Hosokawa, Shin Yamazaki, Kunishige Watanabe, Yutaka Tanigawa, Yasuharu Kaizaki, Sakae Fukushima

Department of Surgery, Fukui Prefectural Hospital

From 1971 to 1990, a total of 1523 patients with early gastric cancer underwent gastric resection in our hospital. Of these, 17 patients (1.1%) had microscopic cancer-positive surgical stumps. We conducted clinicopathological and follow-up investigations in these cases. From the standpoint of morphological features 8 of the 17 cases were the superficial spreading type, 4 were multiple cancerous lesions and 2 coexisted with IIb lesions. Cancer-positive stumps of eight cases were under 10 mm in width and the others more than 10 mm. In 12 cases, cancer cells had invaded the end of the resected stump. In 8 cases cancer cells had spread to the wedge of the superficial layer of the gastric mucosa, in one case of the deep layer, in 8 cases of all layers. As a result of examining the residual stomach, we found residual gastric cancer in 6 cases and re-resected then. Four cases were of the superficial spreading type, cancer-positive stumps of 5 cases were more than 10 mm in width, and in 4 cases cancer cell spread to the wedge of all layers.

Key words
cancer-positive stump, residual gastric carcinoma, remnant stomach carcinoma, early gastric carcinoma, gastric carcinoma

Reprint requests
Osamu Hosokawa Department of Surgery, Fukui Prefectural Hospital
2-8-1 Yotsui, Fukui, 910 JAPAN

Accepted
February 10, 1993

To read the PDF file you will need Abobe Reader installed on your computer.