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Stomach cancer (gastric adenocacinoma) is a common malignant disease in Slovenia. The Lauren’s classification distinguishes between a well differentiated intestinal type and a poorly differentiated diffuse type of the disease, which differ in their development and the characteristic sequence of genetic changes. The purpose of this first study done on a selected sample of Slovene patients was to investigate the allele loss of several tumor suppressor genes (APC, p53, Rb, nm23 and DCC) and thus distinguish between the intestinal and diffuse type of gastric adenocarcinoma in the Slovene population. Another aim of this work was to introduce the newest method for investigating the allele loss. Seventeen randomly selected frozen samples of adenocarcinomas and adjacent normal tissues were obtained from 17 patients treated by surgery in 1997. The polymerase chain reaction was used for multiplying microsatellite sequences of the tumor suppressor genes. The obtained PCR products were analysed with the capillary electrophoresis in the automatic gene analyser. Loss of heterozigosity was found in 17 % of samples for APC, in 50 % for p53, and in 100 % for DCC. There was no loss of heterozigosity for Rb and nm23. Dfferences in genetic alterations between the intestinal and diffuse type of adenocarcinoma in the Slovene population were identified. The results represent a good starting point for the multiplex polymerase chain reaction using a larger set of genetic markers, and for its application in the research of some other, not yet investigated tumor suppressor and mismatch repair genes.