Abstract
The purpose of this study was to investigate the association between patients' prognosis and the discrepancy between macroscopic and pathological findings in gastric cancer. Consecutive 900 patients with gastric cancer who underwent resection for gastric cancer, were studied for the discrepancy between naked-eye and pathological findings of gastric cancers and for immunological makers, such as CD3 T, CD4 T cell, CD8 Tcell and immunosuppressive acidic protein (IAP). We demonstrated that patients whose tumors were both macroscopically and histologyically diagnosed early cancers showed significantly lower IAP levels than those whose tumors were macroscopically diagnosed adcanced, but histologyically diagnosed early cancers, and they also had better outcome than the other. In conclusion, surgeons' naked-eye determinations are very important to fight against gastric cancer, especially in patients with well differentiated adenocarcinoma, and moreover, patients who have more immunosuppressive conditions are tend to take misdiagnose.
