Effects of endoscopic submucosal dissection on post-operative early treatment effectiveness and serum TAT-2 and GP73 expression levels in patients with early gastric cancer

The present study aimed to explore the effectiveness of endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) in the treatment of early gastric cancer (EGC) and its effect on serum tumor-associated trypsin-2 (TAT-2) and Golgi protein 73 (GP73) expression levels to provide a reference for the treatment of EGC. TAT-2 is a proteolytic target enzyme for tumor-associated trypsin inhibitor that has been previously reported to enhance invasion by promoting extracellular matrix degradation. GP73 is a novel type II Golgi membrane protein of unknown function that is expressed in the hepatocytes of patients with adult giant-cell hepatitis. A total of 161 patients with EGC treated at our hospital from April 2013 to February 2014 were selected as the study subjects. Among these, 86 patients underwent ESD (group A) and the remaining 75 underwent endoscopic mucosal resection (group B). Treatment effectiveness, incidence of complications and adverse reactions, operation time, intraoperative blood loss and length of hospital stay, as well as serum TAT-2 and GP73 expression levels, were compared between the two groups. The treatment effectiveness was significantly higher in group A than in group B (P<0.05). However, there was no significant inter-group difference in terms of incidence of complications/adverse reactions (P>0.05). After treatment, serum TAT-2 expression levels decreased in both groups (P<0.05) and serum TAT-2 expression levels were lower in group A than in group B (P<0.05). Furthermore, serum GP73 expression levels were significantly elevated in both groups (P<0.05). Kaplan-Meier survival analysis indicated no significant inter-group difference in the 5-year survival rate (P>0.05). In conclusion, ESD had a good therapeutic effect on EGC and is able to decrease serum TAT-2 expression levels and increase serum GP73 expression levels. The present study was registered into the Chinese Trials Registry (registration no. NCT02157534).