Abstract
The records of 325 patients with early gastric cancer who had undergone curative resection during the previous 12 years were clinico-pathologically analyzed. Among them, 14 (4.3%) died of cancer recurrence. In the recurrent group, moderately differentiated tubular adenocarcionoma (tub2) and poorly differentiated adenocarcinoma (por) were more common than the other histological types. The histological grade of malignancy was investigated histologically after these two histological types were divided into three subtypes: the so-called pure type of tub2 (pure-tub2), the pure type of por (pure-por) and a mixture of types tub2 and por (tub2-por). The incidence of lymph node metastasis in the tub2-por type (28.6%) was statistically higher than that of the pure-tub2 type (9.7%) and the pure-por type (12.8%). Furthermore the incidence of cancer recurrence of type tub2-por (21.4%) was more frequent than that of type pure-tube2 (2.8%) and type pure-por (2.1%). In conclusion, the mixture of types tub2 and por, the socalled tub2-por type was considered a higher grade of malignancy.
