Outcomes after treatment of resectable, node-negative esophageal cancer: A risk-adjusted analysis of the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results registry.
e14562 Background: Esophageal cancer has poor prognosis even in early stages. We examined survival for patients with resectable tumors in the absence of nodal disease in order to assess the benefits of surgery and radiation. Methods: Patients with T1-T3N0M0 squamous cell or adenocarcinoma of the mid or distal esophagus were identified using the SEER database from 1998-2008. The Kaplan-Meier approach and risk-adjusted Cox proportional-hazard models were used to assess 5-year overall survival. Survival risk among treatment modality subgroups (surgery only (SO), radiotherapy only (RO), combined surgery and radiotherapy (CT), and local tumor resection (LR)) was evaluated for the overall patient cohort and stratified among T-stage. SEER does not record chemotherapy use, which therefore wasn’t analyzed. Results: Overall 5-year survival for 4,251 patients identified (mean age 67.7±11.4 years, 966 (22.7%) female) was 37.6% (95% CI: 35.8-39.4). Survival correlated with T-stage: T1N0 48.0% (45.4-50.6); T2N0 29.8% (26.1-33.5); and T3N0 25.8% (22.9-28.7), p<0.001. For T1N0 patients, risk-adjusted survival was better with SO compared to CT (HR: 0.84, CI: 0.74-0.96, p=0.01) while LR and SO were not significantly different (p=0.24) (Table). Treatment with SO or CT had better survival compared to RO for T2N0 and T3N0 patients. The addition of radiation to surgery (CT vs. SO) improved survival for T3N0 patients (HR 0.79, CI 0.65-0.97, p=0.03) but not T2N0 patients (HR: 1.05, CI: 0.81-1.37, p=0.71). Conclusions: Surgical resection without radiation therapy is adequate for T1N0 esophageal cancer, but combined radiation and surgery has the best outcomes for T3N0 patients. Prognoses of T2N0 cancers are more similar to T3N0 cancers than T1N0 cancers, but no survival benefit to adding radiation to surgery for T2N0 patients was seen in this study. [Table: see text]