Gastric Cancer in Young Adults

Abstract

Previous reviews from other countries reveal that less than 5% of gastric cancer cases occur in people under 40 years of age. A retrospective study in the period from 1970 to 1996 was done at the Hospital S. Judas Tadeu, Barretos, SP, using the records of 37 (4.9%) patients of the above age group. It was used UICC´s TNM staging classification, the computer program Stata to do the multivaried analysis according to the model of Cox, and the Kaplan-Meier method for survival analysis. Of the 37 patients, 81.1% were in the age-group 30 to 39, 18.9% were in the age-group 20 to 29, and 54.3% were males. Of the 7 patients under 30 years, 5 were females. The most common symptoms were, respectively: epigastric pain, vomiting, weigh loss, epigastric fullness and fatigue. Three cases were stage I, three were stage II, eleven were stage III, eighteen were stage IV, and in two staging could not be determined. The median survival time was of 561 days (ranging from 3 to 3736 days). There was significant difference (p<0,005) in the survival of the patients with stage I and II in comparison to the ones with stage III and IV. All the patients with initial diagnosis (stage I and II) are still alive and the others died, on average, 9 months after the diagnosis.