['Recently, a set of studies addressed the question of the prevalence of aberrant methylation in surrogate tissues, such as peripheral blood leukocytes. Toward this aim, we conducted a case-control pilot study to investigate aberrant methylation in leukocytes of gastric cancer patients.', 'The SNuPE combined with ion pair reverse phase HPLC (SIRPH method) was used to examine site-specific methylation status at selected CpG sites of the promoter regions of APC, ACIN1, BCL2, CD44, DAPK1, CDKN2A, RARB, TNFRSF10C HS3ST2 and of LINE-1, Alu repeats.', 'We observed that in the patients, tumor suppressor genes were slightly but significantly higher methylated at several CpG sites, while DNA repetitive elements were slightly less methylated compared to controls. This was found to be significantly associated with higher prevalence for gastric cancer.'] Is dNA methylation at selected CpG sites in peripheral blood leukocytes predictive of gastric cancer?