Endoscopic Tumor Length Should Be Reincluded in the Esophageal Cancer Staging System: Analyses of 662 Consecutive Patients

Michele Valmasoni, Elisa Sefora Pierobon, Alberto Ruol, Carlo Alberto De Pasqual, Gianpietro Zanchettin, Lucia Moletta, Renato Salvador, Mario Costantini and Stefano Merigliano

PLOS ONE, 2016, vol. 11, issue 4, 1-12

Abstract: Esophageal cancer represents the 6th cause of cancer mortality in the World. New treatments led to outcome improvements, but patient selection and prognostic stratification is a critical aspect to gain maximum benefit from therapies. Today, patients are stratified into 9 prognostic groups, according to a staging system developed by the American Joint Committee on Cancer. Recently, trying to better select patients with curing possibilities several authors are reconsidering tumor length as a valuable prognostic parameter. Specifically, endoscopic tumor length can be easily measured with an esophageal endoscopy and, if its utility in esophageal cancer staging is demonstrated, it may represent a simple method to identify high risk patients and an easy-to-obtain variable in prognostic stratification. In this study we retrospectively analyzed 662 patients treated for esophageal cancer, stratified according to cancer histology and current staging system, to assess the possible role of endoscopic tumor length. We found a significant correlation between endoscopic tumor length, current staging parameters and 5-year survival, proving that endoscopic tumor length may be used as a simple risk stratification tool. Our results suggest a possible indication for preoperative therapy in early stage squamocellular carcinoma patients without lymph nodes involvement, who are currently treated with surgery alone.

Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0153068 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 53068&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0153068

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0153068

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().