Background: The depth of wall invasion is one of the most important prognostic factors in patients with gastric cancers. We hypothesized that the horizontal width of spread of the neoplasm in the subserosal layer correlated with frequency of latent tumor exposure to the subserosal surface in subserosal (ss) gastric cancer.
Methods: We compared retrospectively the relationship between the horizontal width of ss invasion and other clinicopathologic factors in 124 patients with ss cancer confirmed carefully to have T2 and not T3 neoplasms. Selected clinicopathologic parameters of these ss patients were compared to 134 patients with serosal penetration (se) by gastric cancer, and 78 patients with invasion of the muscularis propria only (mp).
Results: The width of ss invasion was found to be an important prognostic factor on both univariate (P < .001) and multivariate analyses (P = .006). The prognosis of ss-cancer with narrow-width invasion (less than 20 mm) was similar to that of mp-cancer, while the prognosis of ss-cancer with wide width (more than 20 mm) was similar to that of se-cancer.
Conclusion: Our findings showed that narrow-width ss-cancer (<20 mm) behaved very similar to mp-cancers, while wide ss-cancers (> or =20 mm) behaved very similar to se-cancers. These findings demonstrated the prognostic impact of the width of cancer invasion in subserosal layer in patients with ss-cancer. Intensive chemotherapy and close follow-up should be recommended for ss-cancer patients with greater than 20 mm involvement of the subserosal layer.
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