CAD and gastric cancer: In GC patients, sE-cad fragments were firstly investigated by Gofuku et al. [42] who compared the amount of serum sE-cad in 81 GC patients: sE-cad levels were measured [27], and they resulted to be significantly higher in GC patients than in healthy controls, with the highest sE-cad increase being revealed in the GC tissues having a partially reduced expression of the full length E-cad.