Advanced signet ring cell type gastroesophageal cancers in Central American patients age 40 and below: A summary of one tertiary care center's experience and a review of the literature.

Abstract

e15515 Background: Gastric Cancer mortality rates in Central and South America are among the highest in the world. Our institution has monitored a cohort of patients who have presented with metastatic gastroesophageal cancer, age 40 or below. Methods: After observing multiple cases of advanced gastric cancer in young immigrants from Latin America, we performed a retrospective cohort study at Inova Fairfax Hospital, a 1000 bed tertiary care center in Northern Virginia. We reviewed our cancer registry from 2013-2016, to identify all patients, age 40 or below, with stage IV gastric adenocarcinoma. We also reviewed the percentage of hispanic patients in our cancer registry for all cancer diagnoses, for comparison. Results: There were thirteen patients with stage IV gastric cancer who were aged 40 or below found in our registry. Ten of the thirteen patients (76.9%) were from Latin America (see Table 1), with the majority of those being from either El Salvador or Honduras. All thirteen cases were notable for signet ring cell differentiation. Hispanic patients make up only 8.3% of the total subjects and 12.9% of gastric cancer subjects in the Inova Fairfax Hospital Cancer registry during that same time period. Conclusions: Stage IV signet ring cell gastric cancers have occurred frequently at our tertiary care center among young patients from Latin America. Further exploration of epidemiological risk factors is warranted. [Table: see text]