Immunoassessment of patients with gastric cancer. Using leukocyte migration inhibition (LMI) test.

Leukocytes from patients with gastric, colorectal or benign gastrointestinal disease, as well as those from normal control subjects, were tested by the leukocyte migration inhibition test (LMIT), using five different allogeneic 3 M KCl extracts of gastric cancer extracts. In LMIT with a single tumor extract, a pathological MI was found in 48% of 79 gastric cancer patients, a significantly higher figure than in the three other groups of patients (4-21%). In the panel mode of LMIT, that is, testing each blood sample with five different tumor extracts, 62/79 (79%) of patients with gastric cancer showed a positive reaction. Positive reactivity was significantly higher in patients with gastric cancer than in patients in the other groups and the frequency was higher in stage IV cases than in stage I-III cases, although the differences were not significant. In addition, the frequency of the positive reaction was unrelated to the degree of differentiation in adenocarcinoma. Positive reactivity increased in inverse proportion to the degree of nuclear grade (NG) (84% in NG I, 80% in NG II and 64% in NG III), but the correlation was not statistically significant.