Abstract

Gastric cancer is the most frequent cancer and leading cause of death from cancer in Korea. From 1974 to l992, we had experienced 7606 cases of gastric cancer and performed 6928 gastric resections. 1136 cases were early gastric cancer(14.9% of all cases and 16.4% of resected cases). These lesians were in 757 men and in 379 women. The mean age was 54.8 years and peak incidence of age was 6th decade in male, and 5th decade in female. The diagnostic tools were upper gastrointestinal series and gastrofibroscope, and the accuracy was 89.8% and 93.8% respectively. Among them mucosal lesions were 548 cases(48.2%), submucosal lesions were 588 cases(51.8%) and 178 cases(15.7%) had lymph nade metastasis. According to the depth of invasion, the rate of lymph node metastasis was 6.4% in mucosal lesion and 24.3% in submucosal lesion. Macroscopically, Type IIc was the most frequently encountered lesion(52.2%, 593 cases). Histologically, signet ring cell type is the most frequent(25.6%). Overall five-year survival rate was 91.8%, and 94.2% in mucosal lesions, 91.3% in submucosal lesions, 94.5% in NO lesions, 88.3% in Nl lesions and 77.3% in N2 lesions. The most important factor for survival was the status of lymph nade metastasis. The factors associated with lymph node metastasis were depth of invasion, macroscopic type (protruding type) but the size of the lesion, histologic type, sex and age, site of lesion had no association statistically.

• Keywords: Early gastric cancer, Prognostic factors, 5-year surviva1 rate