Endoscopic diagnosis of gastric cancer: an analysis of 872 cases in China.

Endoscopic examination was performed on 15,888 selected cases between 1974 and 1981 in Hunan Province of China. Eight hundred and seventy-two cases (5.5%) of gastric cancer were suspected endoscopically. Twenty-seven of these 872 cases (3.1% of total gastric cancers) were early gastric cancers. Six hundred and seventy-one of the 872 cases were further investigated, and 661 were proved, giving a 98.5% positive rate. The authors collected a total of 92,190 endoscopic examination cases in China; 7,379 cases (8.0%) were gastric cancer, and 219 of these 7,379 were early cases (3% of all gastric cancer). The results compared with the reports from the United States, Europe, and Japan show that the incidence of gastric cancer and detection of early gastric cancer by endoscopy were much lower in China, the United States, and Europe than in Japan.