From January 1, 1966 to December 31, 1991, 137 patients with carcinoma of the stomach underwent standard radical gastrectomy at Belen Hospital, Trujillo, Perú. The patients were classified into two groups--those with age < or = 40 years (n = 19) and those with age > 40 years (n = 118)--and we analyzed herein comparatively clinicopathologic features and five year survival rates using the Mantel Haenszel test. In patients aged 40 years and younger there was a significant increased in the number of patients with carcinomas present in the upper two-thirds of stomach (p < 0.01) and in undifferentiated type adenocarcinoma in histology (p < 0.01) compared with patients more than 40 years old. There were no statistically significant differences between these two groups of age with regard to sex, abdominal mass, size of tumor, type of cancer (early vs advanced carcinoma), Borrmann's criteria, depth of invasion (T), nodal involvement (N), clinical stage (UICC, 1987), type of operation, curability, operative death and five year actuarial survival (8.0 percent vs 6.0 percent, respectively) (p > 0.05). In this study, carcinomas in young people were found to have a higher incidence of undifferentiated forms pathologically and the majority occurred in the body and after gastric resection were similar in both groups of patients.