Our research showed that p53 was not related to the prognosis of gastric cancer. bax acted as an accelerator of apoptosis on cell life. A previous study proposed that the ratio of bax to bcl-2 played a critical role in regulating the propensity for apoptosis. In the present study, the expression of bax was associated with that of bcl-2, and bax overexpression correlated significantly with some clinicopathological features such as gender, histological type, Borrmann type, tumor location, and lymph node metastasis. We found that the patients with positive expression of bax were prone to present lymph node metastasis, and bax was not an independent prognostic factor. This result was different from a previous research. Anagnostopoulos et al. reported that negative bax expression in gastric was associated with lymph node metastasis and poor clinical prognosis. The reasons for the conflicting results were not clear. It was possible that the gene differences between western people and eastern people contributed to this. The proto-oncogene c-myc was a master regulator of cell proliferation and transformation through both transcriptional and nontranscriptional means, and was frequently deregulated in human malignancies. Ninomiya et al. reported that excess reactivity to c-myc product occurred more frequently in invasive cancers than in localized cancers, and c-myc production expression in cancer tissue correlated well with peritoneal dissemination, and patients with c-myc positive expression had poorer prognosis than those with c-myc negative expression. In present study, we did not find any relationship between c-myc expression and invasive behaviour and prognosis other than Borrmann type. We found that c-myc expression was more associated with Borrmann III. The bcl-2 gene was firstly described as an oncogene in follicular lymphoma. It was well known to inhibit apoptosis, but some studies have reported that overexpression of bcl-2 suppressed cellular proliferation and was associated with less aggressive biological behaviour. bcl-2 has been reported in a variety of human epithelial malignant tumors including gastric carcinoma. However, the exact role and clinical significance of bcl-2 remained to be elucidated. Previous studies have shown that the expression of bcl-2 was associated with better prognosis in non-small-cell lung cancer and gastric cancer. Pietenpol et al. reported that overexpression of bcl-2 inhibited the growth of several solid tumor cell lines.