A STUDY ON ASSOCIATION OF SERUM 25-HYDROXY VITAMIN D LEVELS AND GASTRIC CANCER

Abstract

Objectives:

1) To find the association of serum 25-hydroxy vitamin D levels and gastric cancer, and

2) To further investigate if there was any relationship between vitamin D deficiency and progression of gastric cancer.

Material and Methods: The study was a hospital-based prospective study conducted for a period of 2 years. all the patients with biopsy documented gastric cancer were taken as cases and the patients who underwent endoscopy for suspected gastric malignancy but proved to be negative were taken as controls.

Results: The most common histologic type of gastric cancer in our study was poorly differentiated carcinoma (45.76%) followed by moderately differentiated carcinoma (28.81%) and then well-differentiated carcinoma (25.42%). On comparing histological type and severity of vitamin D deficiency we found the histopathological type of malignancy is strongly correlated with the severity of vitamin D deficiency.

Most common pathological stage encountered in our study was stage IIB followed by stage IIIA followed by stage IIIB followed by stage IB and then stage IIIC, stage IIA and stage IV. Average vitamin D levels amongst the control group were 31.65, and amongst cases average vitamin D levels turned to be 20.1.

Conclusion: There appears to be a statistically significant association between gastric cancer and vitamin D deficiency. Also, the histopathological type of malignancy is strongly correlated with the severity of vitamin D deficiency, i. e. , poorly differentiated carcinoma were more often seen in patients with severe vitamin D deficiency. While comparing the stage of disease and severity of vitamin D deficiency we found there was not much significant impact of the stage of disease on the severity of vitamin D deficiency.