Korean J Pathol.  1985 Dec;19(4):391-401.

Immunohistochemical Studies on the Serotonin, Somatostatin and Gastrin-Positive Cells in the Gastric Adenocarcinoma

• Choi C
• Yoo JY

Abstract

In order to study the histogenesis of gastric carcinoma, and to find the correlationship between the gastric carcinoma and endocrine tumor of digestive tract, we performed immunoperoxidase staining for serotonin, somatostatin and gastrin respectively in the 34 cases of surgically resected gastric carcinoma. The results were as follows; 1) Endocrine cells were found in 26.5% (9/34) of the gastric adenocarcinoma, but in 58.6% (17/29) in the normal gastric mucosa near the cancer area. The occurrence of endocrine cells was less frequent in cancer than in the normal gastric mucosa. 2) Among the 15 cases of intestinal type adenocarcinoma, serotonin-positive cells were found in 2 cases, somatostatin-positive cells in 1 case and gastrin-positive cells in 1 case. Among 16 cases of diffuse type adenocarcinoma, gastrin-positive cells were found in 2 cases, and somatostatin-positive cells were found in 2 cases. 3) We concluded that, the endocrine cells are more frequently observed in the well differentiated gastric carcinoma than poorly differentiated carcinoma tissue. In summary, gastric carcinomas are supposed to arise from the totipotent stem cells of endoderm origin, and they have multidirectional property of differentiation into both endocrine and nonendocrine cells. Most of them differentiate into nonendocrine cells and only a few of them differentiate into endocrine cells.