Malignancies in the families of patients with gastric polyps.

: The present series consists of 155 patients with gastric polyps who attended the Central University Hospital of Tampere/between 1972 and 1983/but who did not develop gastric malignancies during the follow-up. 93 patients with non-ulcer dyspepsia served as controls. Both the experimental and control patients were interviewed with the help of a schedule as to the occurrence of malignancies among their family. The family was defined as parents, grand parents, brothers, sisters and children. There was a total of 961 members in the families of the study patients and 755 in the families of controls. In the families of the men with gastric polyps, the frequency of intestinal malignancies as a percentage of all malignancies was higher than in the controls, 10.3 and 2.9 percent, respectively (p less than 0.01). The frequency of gastric malignancies in the families of the women with gastric polyps was higher than in the controls and in men, 6.2, 3.1 and 2.4 percent, respectively (p less than 0.05, and p less than 0.025). The frequencies of all malignancies were similar in the study and control families. Thus there seems to be some family -related accumulation of intestinal malignancies in men and of gastric malignancies in women with gastric polyps.