A Carcinosarcoma of the Stomach

Shinya Inoue, Fuyo Yoshimi, Hitoshi Tonouchi, Hisayuki Ono, Ryuta Amemiya, Sumihiko Koizumi, Hiroshi Hasegawa, Masayuki Itabashi*

Department of Surgery and Pathology*, Ibaraki Prefectural Central Hospital and Cancer Center

Carcinosarcoma is not very rare in the uterus, breast and esophagus, but is very rare in the stomach. We present a case of gastric carcinosarcoma in a 74-year-old woman. She complained of dysphagia. We found a tumor growing in the cardia and the lower esophagus. As the tumor was diagnosed as gastric cancer invading to the lower esophagus, total gastrectomy and lower esophagectomy was performed. The pathologic diagnosis was carcinosarcoma of the stomach. As the sarcomatous component was welldifferentiated to chondrosarcoma, we concluded that the tumor is a true carcinosarcoma. Most of the carcinosarcomas previously reported are "so-called carcinosarcoma" in which "sarcomatous component" is spindle cell sarcoma, not showing definite differentiation toward a specific organ or tissue. There are only four reported cases of true carcinosarcomas in which the sarcomatous component was differentiated to the specific nonepithelial cell. In this case, we considered that the carcinoma cell acquired the ability to produce cartilaginous tissue histologically and immunologically.

Key words
carcinosarcoma of the stomach

Reprint requests
Shinya Inoue The First Department of Surgery, Tokyo University School of Medicine
7-3-1 Hongo, Bunko-ku, Tokyo 113-0033 JAPAN

Accepted
January 14, 1998

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