STOMACH PRESERVATION IN LOW- AND HIGH-GRADE PRIMARY GASTRIC LYMPHOMAS: PRELIMINARY RESULTS

rimary extranodal non-Hodgkin’s lym-phomas account for 10-30 % of all non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas. The most com-mon site of extranodal lymphomas is the stom-ach where they represent less than 5 % of all malignancies. While both the incidence and the mortality of gastric cancer have been decreasing over the past several years in Western countries, primary gastric lymphomas (PGL) have been steadily rising over the same period (from 3.5 to 7 per million people).1-5 The optimal management of PGL has yet to be defined. Up to now surgery has been regarded as essential because it enables diagnosis and accu-rate staging, reduces the risk of bleeding and/or perforation after chemotherapy and/or radio-therapy, and cures some patients or has debulk-ing value in the others.6-13 Of late, the need for surgery as a diagnostic tool has been decreasing because a histological diagnosis can be obtained by endoscopic biop-sies in more than 90 % of cases.1,14,15 Staging performed with non-invasive meth-ods is unable to distinguish between stage I and stage II1, but this distinction has no therapeutic relevance because these two stages behave simi-larly.14,1