Gastric ulcer as a pre-cancerous condition.

There are two schools of thought: one believes that the benign gastric ulcer cannot convert into cancer, and the other affirms that it represents a precancerous condition. Gastric ulcer is probably just a symptom of a multifactorial disease or other alteration (like dysplasia, metaplasia) associated with a precancerous condition. Up to now the only possibility of following up precancerous lesions and diagnosing early gastric cancer has been to perform multiple biopsies during endoscopy since the search of specific markers has not shown any practical utility.