Purpose of review: Gastric cancer remains a prevalent disease with a 5-year mortality rate of less than 25%. This review focuses on the endoscopic detection, staging, and management of gastric adenocarcinoma.
Recent findings: Confocal laser endomicroscopy and narrow band imaging have a 77-99.4% sensitivity for early cancer detection, a significant improvement when compared with white light endoscopy. Proper staging can be accomplished through endoscopic ultrasound and multidetector row-computed tomography, with accuracy as high as 90.1%. Endoscopic management of early gastric cancer is minimally invasive and can be preferable to surgery. In properly selected patients, endoscopic submucosal dissection has been found to have 100% 5-year survival.
Summary: The recent advances in gastric cancer have greatly improved the care we can offer our patients in gastric oncology. The emerging technologies will hopefully continue to promote this trend.