Clinical staging of gastric cancer: Gastric cancer can be divided into stage I, II, III and IV. Stage I is the earliest and stage IV is the latest. The early gastric cancer we often hear refers to stage I only, and the rest are called middle and late gastric cancer (also called progressive gastric cancer). The staging of gastric cancer in China at the time of diagnosis: stage I accounts for 4.1%, stage II accounts for 21.8%, stage III accounts for 31.7% and stage IV accounts for 42.4%. From this ratio, we can see that the diagnosis of early gastric cancer in China is extremely low. It is a far cry from the neighboring Japan. In Japan, gastroscopy and colonoscopy were introduced as health checkups as early as the 1990s, and each of the three age groups of 40, 50, and 60 must be examined once for stomach and colonoscopy. Therefore, the detection rate of early gastric cancer and intestinal cancer in Japan is significantly higher than that in China, and naturally the treatment effect of these two tumors is also better than that in China. The average number of days to confirm the diagnosis of gastric cancer in China: The average time required from the first diagnosis to the confirmation of gastric cancer is 113.5 days, 96.8% of which are confirmed by the consultation in general hospitals. From this data, we can see that gastric cancer is not well diagnosed. Why is it so? In fact, the diagnosis of gastric cancer is very simple: one only needs to do a gastroscopy to take a piece of stomach tissue for pathological section, and then a definite diagnosis can be made. Why is a very simple problem difficult? The reasons are twofold: 1. Doctors do not pay attention to it and always treat it as a stomach disease and take medicine, instead of suggesting gastroscopy. 2. Patients delay the examination because they are afraid of the pain of gastroscopy, resulting in delayed diagnosis. Our neighboring country Japan uses gastroscopy as a screening test for gastric cancer, so they can have high diagnosis rate of early gastric cancer and better treatment effect than China. Five-year survival rate of gastric cancer: In China, the average five-year survival rate of gastric cancer in general hospitals is 30%, but in some specialized hospitals, it can be as high as 50%; and then look at the five-year survival rates of various clinical stages: 83.3% for stage I, 59.3% for stage II, 22.1% for stage III and 1.8% for stage IV. From this set of data, the treatment effect of early gastric cancer (i.e. stage I) is obviously better than other stages, but only 4.1% of gastric cancer is stage I at the time of diagnosis. Regional differences in the incidence of gastric cancer: In China, the incidence of gastric cancer is highest in the northwestern provinces of Qinghai, Ningxia and Gansu, followed by the southeastern coastal provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian and Shanghai, and lowest in the southern provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangdong and Guangxi.