Oesophageal cancer
- Study type
- Review article
- Design
- Comprehensive review (Primer) on the biology and treatment of oesophageal cancer
- Source
- Nat Rev Dis Primers · 2017
In plain words
Cancer of the oesophagus (food pipe) is one of the leading causes of cancer death worldwide and has two main types: squamous cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma. Most patients need treatments such as chemotherapy, radiotherapy combined with chemotherapy, and/or surgery. In advanced disease, palliative chemotherapy is used, and in patients whose cancer is HER2-positive, the drug trastuzumab can also help. The right treatment should be chosen with your treating doctor based on each patient's situation.
Clinical significance and place in guidelines
This paper is a comprehensive review of knowledge as of 2017 and is not a clinical trial. According to the abstract, treatment for most patients is multimodal (chemotherapy, chemoradiotherapy and/or surgery), premalignant lesions may be treated with endoscopic ablation, patients with advanced or metastatic disease are treated with palliative chemotherapy, and trastuzumab can be beneficial in HER2-positive cases. Immunotherapy had shown promising early results at that time. Because this review dates from 2017, the current status of treatments and clinical guidelines should be checked separately.
Limitations
This paper is a comprehensive review, not a primary study; the abstract does not describe the search and source selection methods and provides no quantitative data (such as survival or adverse events). Immunotherapy results are described as "early" in the abstract and the review dates from 2017, so it may not be consistent with newer evidence and guidelines.
This summary was prepared by the editorial team from the published paper; the original paper is the final reference. Read the original abstract on PubMed.