The stomach serves as a storage place for our food. It does important preparatory work for our digestion by mixing the food we eat with gastric juice and finally passing this pulp on to the intestines in small quantities. This organ can also become cancerous. Men and the over 50 age group are particularly affected. Even if the chances of recovery are rather poor (only about 30% of patients survive more than five years after diagnosis), there has been a decrease in new cases and fatal outcomes. This is probably due to a more conscious and healthy diet, which has become the focus of society in recent years.
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types of gastric cancer
There are different types of gastric cancer : adenocarcinomas (approx. 95% of all gastric cancers are adenocarcinomas), squamous cell carcinomas and the rare gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST) and neuroendocrine tumors (NET). While adenocarcinomas originate in glandular cells of the gastric mucosa, squamous cell carcinomas arise in the skin cells between the glands. This cancer is also in other organs and especially on the actual skinlocated, potentially, where there are skin cells. GIST occurs in the connective tissue of the gastrointestinal tract (a third of its occurrences are therefore also found in the small intestine) and NET is a malformation of the neuroectoderm where hormones are produced. When cells evade the normal control of their growth, they begin to proliferate – becoming cancerous cells that invade and destroy other cells. All of these cell proliferations can be benign and malignant – this is what needs to be found out in the event of an illness.
