Tumors of the Stomach & Small Intestine

Common gastric and small intestine malignancies include adenocarcinoma, lymphoma, metastatic carcinoma, gastrintestinal stromal tumors, and carcinoid. These must be differentiated from benign ulcerative lesions and polyps by endoscopic or surgical biopsy
Symptoms and signs include dyspepsia, weight loss, obstructive symptoms, and evidence of intestinal blood loss or iron deficiency anemia.
Diagnosis of early stage gastric cancer requires a high index of suspicion for patients who are at increased risk, for examplein patients aged over 40-45 years, history, prior history of pernicious anemia, celiac sprue, immunodeficy or gastric polyps. Diagnosis requires refferal for endoscopy and/or barium radiologic exams.
Diagnosis of small bowel tumors often requires a barium enteroclysis examination performed by an experienced radiologist or endoscopy using small bowel enteroscopes





The stomach and less frequently the small intestine give rise to a variety of benign and malignant tumors. In 5000 endoscopic examinations of the stomach conducted over a 7 years perioed at University of Chicago, aproximately 119 gastric malignancy (2,4%) and 125 benign gastric polyps (2,5%)were diagnosed. The most gastric malignancies is adenocarcinoma, followed by primary gastric lymphoma, metastatic carcinoma, and less frequently leiomyosarcoma, carcinoid and kaposi's Sarcoma.
Gastric cancer is particularly common in Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet union , Costa Rica, and South America.
Read more...