Many people find gastric mucosal intestinal metaplasia during gastroscopy, which is a precancerous lesion. Excessive anxiety due to worrying about cancer, and even unable to eat or sleep well. In fact, this is a lack of correct understanding of intestinal transformation, and I am intimidated by the word "precancer".
Intestinal metaplasia, short for intestinal metaplasia, is a pathological term that refers to the replacement of a part of gastric mucosal cells by intestinal cells. For example, the gastric mucosa is a piece of lawn. Due to various reasons, the grass in some places withers (shrinks), and wormwood grows in these places where there is no grass, and these wormwood is intestinalization. In fact, this is a response of the human body to adapt to environmental changes. If the gastric mucosa has intestinal metaplasia in old age, it can also be considered as a degenerative disease.
Gastric cancer is the result of multiple factors acting together and evolving over a long period of time. It is impossible for intestinal metaplasia to develop into gastric cancer in a short period of time. Except for a few undifferentiated carcinomas related to genetic factors, most gastric cancers are intestinal adenocarcinomas based on Helicobacter pylori infection.
According to the traditional development model of gastric cancer, intestinal metaplasia occurs on the basis of chronic atrophic gastritis, and the next step is the dysplasia (dysplastic hyperplasia) stage that develops in a malignant direction, and then gastric cancer.
This process brings a great psychological burden to patients with intestinal metaplasia of gastric mucosa. In fact, gastric mucosal intestinal metaplasia is very common in clinical practice. There are many reasons and types, and it does not cause any discomfort. It still belongs to the same biological stage as atrophy. Most mucosal intestinal metaplasia stagnates, and only a few eventually develop into stomach cancer. According to the statistics of gastroscopic examination and biopsy pathological examination results, the detection rate of intestinal metaplasia is 10% to 23.6%, and the detection rate is higher in middle-aged and elderly people. More than half of the people over 60 years old have various degrees of intestinal metaplasia. Although its incidence is high, the probability of cancer is very low, so there is no need to worry too much.
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