Surgeon, Bombay Hospital, Mumbai 400 020. Polyp is a gross description or a clinical term used to describe a sessile or pedunculated mass protruding above the surface of mucosa and into the lumen. The polyp can be inflammatory or neoplastic, benign or malignant.
Polyps occur throughout the gastrointestinal tract but are particularly common in the large bowel.
It is universally agreed that adenocarcinomas of the large bowel often arise from an adenomatous polyp. In fact, adenoma-carcinoma sequence in the large intestine has been used as a model to study the sequence of genetic changes that occur in the evolution of cancer. An accurate histological diagnosis and classification of polyps is important for a correct therapeutic approach. During a 30 year period a total of 8194 biopsies and resected specimens of the large bowel were studied. There were 562 polyps and 1568 adenocarcinomas.