Inflammatory Cells in Gastric Cancer: Promoting the Tumour or Protecting the Host?

Abstract

The study represents a comprehensive retrospective morphological profiling of gastric carcinoma in order to reveal associations between certain tumour-infiltrating inflammatory cells and clinical and/or pathological parameters. Patients’ age and gender, the extent of local tumour spread (pT), presence of metastases in regional lymph nodes (pN), tumour grade (G) as well as type according to World Health Organisation (WHO) and Lauren classifications were assessed in 211 consecutive surgically resected gastric carcinomas. Tumour-infiltrating inflammatory cells including eosinophils, neutrophils and lymphocytes were counted within the cancer stroma in five randomly selected high-power fields representative of the tumour. Descriptive statistics, Mann–Whitney and Kruskal–Wallis tests were applied; p < 0.05 was considered significant. Higher number of stromal eosinophils was associated with absence of metastases in regional lymph nodes (pN0) and histological structure of adenocarcinoma by WHO classification (p = 0.005 and p = 0.002, respectively). Higher count of stromal neutrophils showed significant associations with younger age (less than 65 years), and intestinal type by Lauren classification (p = 0.029 and p = 0.007, respectively). The density of stromal lymphocytes lacked any statistically significant association with the evaluated clinical or morphological parameters. In conclusion, the current study highlights the links between certain innate immune system cells and morphological features of gastric carcinoma.