Review
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2019. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastrointest Oncol. Sep 15, 2019; 11(9): 665-678
Published online Sep 15, 2019. doi: 10.4251/wjgo.v11.i9.665
Premalignant lesions and gastric cancer: Current understanding
Athanasios Koulis, Andrew Buckle, Alex Boussioutas
Athanasios Koulis, Andrew Buckle, Alex Boussioutas, Upper Gastrointestinal Translational Laboratory, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne 3000, Australia
Athanasios Koulis, Andrew Buckle, Alex Boussioutas, the Sir Peter MacCallum Department of Surgical Oncology, the University of Melbourne, Melbourne 3010, Australia
Alex Boussioutas, Department of Medicine, Royal Melbourne Hospital, University of Melbourne, Parkville, 3050, Australia
Author contributions: All authors equally contributed to this paper with conception, literature review and analysis, drafting and critical revision and editing, and final approval of the final version.
Conflict-of-interest statement: No potential conflicts of interest.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Alex Boussioutas, MBBS, PhD, FRACP, Upper Gastrointestinal Translational Laboratory, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Locked Bag 1, A'Beckett Street, Victoria 8006, Australia. alex.boussioutas@petermac.org
Telephone: +61-3-85595000
Received: February 25, 2019
Peer-review started: February 26, 2019
First decision: May 24, 2019
Revised: May 29, 2019
Accepted: August 20, 2019
Article in press: August 21, 2019
Published online: September 15, 2019
Processing time: 201 Days and 1 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Despite recent advances in our understanding of the molecular and cellular events involved in gastric cancer, little is known about how gastric premalignant lesions actually lead to this usually lethal disease (5 years survival about 20% in most Western countries). It is still not clear whether some or all of these lesions are directly involved in the process of gastric carcinogenesis or whether they are simply bystanders. In this review, we attempt to shed some light into how our current understanding of premalignant lesions may be used to improve patient stratification and lead to better overall patient survival rates.