Abstract
Objective: To qualify gastric cancer screening with ultrathin transnasal endoscopy in our facility.
Methods: We compared the detection rate of gastric cancer by transnasal endoscopy to that using regular-sized endoscopy. We examined 12,021 and 9,819 male health check-up subjects by transnasal ultrathin endoscopy and regular-sized endoscopy, respectively, from April 1995 to March 2011.
Results: Gastric cancer was detected in 34 subjects in the transnasal endoscopy group, and the detection rate was 0.28%. The results were not inferior to those for the regular-sized oral endoscopy group (31 subjects and 0.32%). The clinicopathological findings for the cancer cases indicated an early cancer rate of 85.3% in the transnasal endoscopy group, and 38.2% of the cancer cases were treated by endoscopic resection. These results were not significantly different from those for the regular-sized endoscopy group. In the transnasal endoscopy group, lesions located at the U regions were more frequent than in the regular-sized endoscopy group, and those of less than 20 mm in diameter were also more frequent.
Conclusion: These results show that transnasal endoscopy is not inferior to regular-sized endoscopy for gastric cancer screening. For further investigation, we need to conduct a multi-center prospective study using a standardized observation method.
