Pathological diagnosis is maybe non-essential for special gastric cancer: Case reports and review

摘要

Histopathological results are critical for the diagnosis and surgical decision regarding gastric cancer. How-ever, opposite opinions from radiology and pathology can sometimes affect clinical decisions. The two cases reported in this article were both highly suspected as gastric cancer by clinical manifestations and radiologic findings, although both showed negative results in the first biopsy examination. One was confirmed as gastric cancer by the time of the 6 th biopsy, while the other was still negative even after 8 biopsies. With a definite pathologic result and the agreement of the patient for the latter case, both of them finally received surgery. Postoperative pathological examination revealed find-ings that were the same as Borrmann type Ⅳ gastric cancer. We believed that duplicate biopsies under ra-diologic guidance were necessary for highly suspected gastric cancer cases in the absence of a definite pathol-ogy result, and patients should be under close follow-up. We propose that, if gastric cancer is highly sus-pected when typical radiology changes of widely diffuse gastric parietal lesions suffice to exclude lymphoma and other similar situations, and even in absence of a posi-tive biopsy result, a diagnostic laparotomy under lapa-roscopy and even radical gastrectomy may be reason-ably performed by an experienced gastric cancer center with the agreement of the patient after being decided by a multidisciplinary discussion team.