ABSTRACT
From January 1990 to March 1994, 61 patients with thoracic esophageal cancer were treated at our institute. We analyzed the medical records retrospectively to find any prognostic factors of esophageal cancer surgery. The age ranged from 36 years to 74 years and the mean age was 58.3 years. The sex ratio of men to women was 14:1. The mean duration of dysphagia was 3.8 months and they mostly suffered from the dysphagia of grade IV. Tumors were staged postoperatively; 2 stage I, 23 Stage II, 27 stage III, 9 stage IV, and the resectability was 78.7%. Fortynine patients underwent curative esophageal resection and 5 patients permitted palliative esophagogastrostomy with incomplete tumor resection. Five patients underwent feeding gastrostomy and 2 patients were managed with Celestin tube. The most common complication was atelectasis and pneumonia, and early mortality rate was 5.6%. There were 9 cases of identified local recurrence or distant metastasis. Estimated overall actuarial survival rate d uring the follow-up was 73.4% in 1 year, 54.7% in 2 years, and 23.1% in 4 years. The tumor stage higher than II(p = 0.02) was confirmed as a poor prognostic factor.