Table 1. Main demographic and clinical characteristics of the 921 patients of the whole series (Siena, Forlì and Verona) who underwent R0 resection for gastric cancer between January 1988 and December 1998 and of the 261 patients resected in Verona from 1988 to 1999, where information on excised and positive nodes was available for each of the three tiers defined by the Japanese Gastric Cancer Association (1998). Values are reported as means (s.d.) for the continuous variable and as absolute values (per cent values) for categorical variables.