| Summary: | Background: Incidence of Esophageal cancer (EC) is increasing now a days and it has became a sixth leading cause of cancer related death in world. EC is associated with multiple risk factors. Despite various advances in the treatment of EC, it remains one of the least responsive tumors to cancer therapy, thereby overall prognosis remains poor. The current status of EC in North West India in relation to the demographics, diagnosis, staging, multimodality treatment, and the future perspectives are discussed.
Methods and Materials: This is a retrospective analysis of medical records of the EC patients registered in the Department of Radiation Oncology SMS Medical and Attached Hospitals Jaipur from January 2015 to December 2019.
Results: Out of 10,464 patients with various malignancies registered in SMS hospital for radiotherapy via Co-60 technique in the previous 5 years from 2015-2019; 449 were having EC. 40.25% patients were in 6th decade and male to female ratio was 1.49:1. EC was most common in farmers (51.79%) and 76.16% patients were the resident of rural areas addicted with smoking (41.4%) and tobacco chewing (24.7%) habit. Dysphagia was the presenting feature in almost all the patients. Most common type and site of involvement were squamous type (75.72%) and middle third (45.43%) part of the esophagus respectively. 39.19% patients presented in stage III and 24.70% patients in stage IVA. The patients were planned with treatment according to their age, performance status, extent of disease and other co-morbidities.
Conclusions: At our centre most of the patients landed up in advanced stage poverty, illiteracy, ignorance, late diagnosis. Majority of the EC patient were addicted with smoking and tobacco chewing habit, hence screening of high risk population and lifestyle modifications limiting the use of tobacco, may help in the early detection and can decrease the mortality related to EC. Careful selection of patients for radical treatment is very important for providing relatively longer disease free interval.
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