Early gastric cancer with juxta lymph node (n3) metastasis.

From 1976 to 1992, a total of 714 cases of early gastric cancer (EGC) were treated by resection in the First Department of Surgery, Kurume University Hospital. For EGC, the overall lymph node metastasis rate is generally 10%, with the lymph node metastasis observed mainly in the Group 1 perigastric nodes in both mucosal cancer and submucosal cancer. Three rare cases of an early gastric cancer with Group 3 juxta regional lymph node metastasis are described because Group 3 lymph nodes are rarely discovered. To our knowledge, only 14 other cases of EGC with juxta regional lymph node metastasis have been reported in the Japanese literature.