Incidence of gastrointestinal stromal tumor: a retrospective study based on immunohistochemical and mutational analyses

Abstract

The aim of this study is to estimate the incidence of the gastrointestinal stromal tumor after the previous diagnoses were confirmed and/or revised by both immunohistochemical and mutational analyses. We reviewed 17,858 surgically excised gastrointestinal lesions in our hospital from 1998 to 2004. All mesenchymal tumors were examined for CD117 expression by immunohistochemistry, and every CD117-negative mesenchymal tumors were further subjected to mutational analysis for KIT and PDGFRA exons. The results showed that approximately 35% of gastrointestinal stromal tumors were misdiagnosed if immunohistochemical analysis of CD117 expression was not performed; and approximately 15% misdiagnosed if mutation analysis was not available. Because approximately 4.72% of patients with gastrointestinal malignancies in Taiwan were treated in our hospital and the average of newly diagnosed gastrointestinal stromal tumors in our hospital was 14.33 cases per year, the estimated annual incidents of gastrointestinal stromal tumor in Taiwan were 303.60. Therefore, the annual incidence of gastrointestinal stromal tumor is 13.74 per million Taiwanese.

Fig. 1

Incidents of gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) in Mackay Memorial Hospital (MMH) from 1998 to 2004 appear to be constant before 2000. However, the case number was markedly influenced by exogenous factors such as reputation of managing GIST patients and unrelated epidemic corona viral infection (severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS)