Surgery for early gastric cancer: a European one-center experience.

Between 1972 and 1995 a total of 251 patients with early gastric cancer underwent resection in our department of surgery. At the time of the operation 10.8% of the patients were proved to have lymph node involvement, and two already had distant metastases. A subtotal gastric resection was performed in 59.8% of cases (n = 150), a total gastrectomy in 33.8% (n = 85), and either a proximal or an atypical resection in 6.4% (n = 16). Since 1985 subtotal distal resection and total gastrectomy were accompanied by a systematic lymphadenectomy of compartments I and II. The overall postoperative morbidity was 18.3%, and the hospital mortality, 4.9%; it was only 1.6% within the last decade. Concerning these short-term results there were no statistically significant differences between the different surgical procedures. The cumulative overall 5-year-survival rate was 82.6%. There was no statistically significant influence of either the different surgical procedures or the histologic types according to the Japanese classification of early gastric cancer.