Purpose: Tumor size has been reported to be one of the prognostic factors in the preoperative setting and 8 cm has been confirmed as a cut-off value for large gastric tumors with respect to postoperative complications. The aim of this study was to inv...
Purpose: Tumor size has been reported to be one of the prognostic factors in the preoperative setting and 8 cm has been confirmed as a cut-off value for large gastric tumors with respect to postoperative complications. The aim of this study was to investigate the clinicopathologic features in patients with tumors larger than 8cm in diameter.
Materials and Methods : We studied 443 patients with gastric cancer who underwent a gastrectomy from January to December in 2006 at the Department of Surgery, Kosin University College of Medicine. For a comparative analysis we divided the cases into the large and the small groups according to tumor size. The clinicopathological factors associated with large gastric tumors were analyzed by using cross tab and bivariate correlation analyses. we used p<0.05 as the cutoff value for statistical significance.
Result : Thirty-nine(8.8%) of 443 cases were large gastric cancer and four hundred and four cases were small gastric cancer. Cross tab and bivariate correlation analyses disclosed that tumor location(p<0.001), type of operation(p<0.05), depth of invasion(p<0.001), lymph node metastasis(p<0.001), lymphatic invasion(p<0.001), and perineural invasion(p<0.001) were significantly different between the two groups. The incidence of intestinal type of gastric cancer by Lauren was significantly higher in small cancer than that of large cancer(p=0.042).
Conclusion : Large gastric tumors showed more aggressive local findings than their smaller counterparts. In patients with gastric tumors, a curative resection was the most important factor for the prognosis. Therefore, we suggest that every effort should be made to do a curative gastrectomy and an accurate preoperative examination.