Carcinoma of the reconstructed stomach tube following esophageal resection for a benign stricture: report of a case and review of the literature.

We report herein the case of a 60-year-old woman who presented with dysphagia and anorexia and was subsequently diagnosed as having gastric cancer of the reconstructed stomach tube 36 years after undergoing surgery for a benign esophageal stricture. Reports on carcinoma of the reconstructed stomach tube are rarely found and interestingly, all of the previous cases, which were documented only in the Japanese literature, corresponded to metachronous double cancers after esophageal malignancies. To our knowledge, this is the first case of carcinoma of the reconstructed stomach tube following esophageal resection for a benign stricture, and it is thought that the carcinoma probably developed at the site of the anastomosis a long time after the first operation. We reviewed 30 cases of carcinoma of the reconstructed stomach tube for which the clinicopathological data was complete, and we believe that this new type of cancer needs more than 10 years to develop and should be defined as "carcinoma of the gastric remnant".