Incidence and Prognostic Significance of Signet Ring Cell Histology in Gastric Cancer: A Cross-Sectional Study in Turkey

The prognostic significance of an SRC histology in gastric cancer is still a matter of debate. There have been only limited studies of SRC gastriccancer based on the new definition.

The current research was targeted toward investigating the incidence of signet ring cell (SRC) histology in patients with gastric cancer and its prognostic significance for disease staging.

Thisretrospective research was performed on 309 patients at the Kartal Koşuyolu High Specialization Training and Research Hospital Gastroenterology Surgery Clinic in Turkey, between November 2006 and September 2019. For the purpose of the study, the clinicopathological features and survival status of the patients were examined in the presence of SRC histology.

According to the results, 71.4% of the patients had gastric cancer with non-SRC histology, and the rest (28.6%) had SRC histology. The presence of SRC histology was found to be correlated with young age (P=0.007), advanced depth of wall invasion (P=0.001), number of positive lymph nodes (P=0.022), and presence of vascular invasion (P=0.044). In addition, SRC histology presence was found to be in association with a good prognosis of stage I gastric cancer (P=0.045) but a poor prognosis of stage III disease (P=0.034). However, the results revealed no significant association between stage II gastric cancer and overall survival.

Our findings were indicative of the association of survival with good prognosis of stage I and poor prognosis of stage III among patients with gastric cancer and SRC histology. However, no prognostic significance could be established for overall survival.