Objective: To investigate the diagnostic and prognostic role of gastric fluid DNA (gfDNA) in gasric cancer (GC) patients and controls submitted to upper digestive endoscopy. Design: The concentration of gfDNA was evaluated in 941 samples, including subjects with normal gastric mucosa (n = 10), peptic diseases (n = 596), pre-neoplastic conditions (n = 99), and cancer (n = 236). gfDNA levels were evaluated according to age, gender, BMI, gastric fluids pH, use of proton-pump inhibitors, GC tumor subtypes, histological grades, clinical stages, and disease progression/outcome. Results: In the non-cancer group, we observed that gfDNA levels are increased in women as compared to men (p=7.44e-4). Remarkably, gfDNA levels are increased in GC patients as compared to non-GC (normal + peptic diseases, p=5.67e-13) and in GC versus pre-neoplastic disease (p=1.53e-6). Similar differences were also seen when more advanced tumors (T3) were compared to early stages (T2 and below) (p=5.97-4). Moreover, our results suggest the prognostic value of gfDNA as GC-patients with higher gfDNA concentrations (<1.28ng/microliter) had increased infiltration of immune cells in the tumor (p=1.06e-3), which parallels with better disease-free survival (p= 0.014). Conclusion: These findings highlight the significance of collecting and studying stomach fluids from gastric cancer patients and reveals the potential impact of this approach as well as its diagnostic and prognostic value for disease management.