1. A Case of Gastric Amphicrine Signet-Ring Cell Carcinoma
- Author
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Nami Asano, Yusuke Kito, Yuki Hanamatsu, Kazuhiko Nakada, Chiemi Saigo, Yohei Takeda, and Tamotsu Takeuchi
- Subjects
Microbiology (medical) ,Pathology ,medicine.medical_specialty ,Histology ,multipotent stem cell ,Case Report ,Amphicrine tumor ,Pathology and Forensic Medicine ,Poorly cohesive carcinoma ,Cancer stem cell ,Signet ring cell carcinoma ,Biopsy ,lcsh:Pathology ,medicine ,Carcinoma ,Lymph node ,biology ,medicine.diagnostic_test ,business.industry ,gastric cancer ,CD44 ,Cancer ,medicine.disease ,CD44v9 ,medicine.anatomical_structure ,biology.protein ,business ,lcsh:RB1-214 - Abstract
“Amphicrine” (in Greek, amphi- means “both” or “double”) refers to cells that synchronously exhibit the endocrine and exocrine phenotypes. Gastric amphicrine carcinoma is very rare, and only a few case reports are found in the English literature; thus, its pathobiological features remain unclear. Here, we report a case of amphicrine gastric carcinoma. A woman in her sixth decade of life presented with anemia and underwent upper endoscopy, followed by histopathological examination of biopsy specimens. She appeared to have gastric cancer with a tumor measuring 5.0 cm × 4.0 cm in size. Subsequently, the patient underwent total gastrectomy with lymph node dissection. Histopathological examination revealed a poorly cohesive carcinoma that sparsely coexisted with signet-ring cell carcinoma cells with regional lymph node metastasis. Interestingly, synaptophysin immunoreactivity with the coexistence of Alcian blue was found in individual signet-ring cell carcinoma cells. Furthermore, the present amphicrine carcinoma cells immunohistochemically expressed CD44 variant 9, a functional cancer stem cell marker. We believe that the present case findings may support the idea of multipotent stem cells being an origin of amphicrine gastric cancers.
- Published
- 2019