While preoperative chemoradiation is likely to play an increasingly important role in the management of resectable esophageal cancer, postoperative chemoradiation will also continue to play a role. Since clinical staging is not always accurate, some patients deemed not to be candidates for preoperative chemoradiation based on clinical staging, may be found to have more advanced disease at surgery, and may then require postoperative Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical chemoradiation. Moreover, in patients with gastroesophageal junction carcinomas, the role of PD98059 post-operative chemoradiation is supported by the phase III Intergroup trial (4). In this trial,
556 patients with gastric (around 80%) or gastroesophageal
junction (around 20%) adenocarcinoma were randomized to receive either surgery alone or surgery Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical with post-operative chemoradiation. Patients in the post-operative chemoradiation arm had a median survival of 36 months and patients in the surgery alone arm had a median survival of 27 months (P=0.005). In summary, Jabbour et al. have presented a well-written, thorough, evidence-based review article on the role of postoperative chemoradiation and other approaches Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical for the treatment of esophageal cancer. This review article will help increase our understanding of combined modality therapy for esophageal cancer. Footnotes No potential conflict of interest.
In the treatment of rectal cancer, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical there are many different treatment paradigms depending on the extent of disease, making initial staging and work-up extremely important. And with recent investigations showing the importance of treatment sequence, inaccurate initial staging can potentially have a considerable
impact on treatment outcome. For patients with a newly diagnosed Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical rectal cancer, a full colonoscopy should be performed to ensure that there are no other lesions in the large intestine that would impact management. In addition, a rigid proctoscopy should be performed by the surgeon in order because to determine the size and location of the tumor, particularly the distance of the lesion from the anal verge. Additional work-up includes a full physical examination, computed tomography (CT) of the chest, abdomen, and pelvis, and a carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) level (4). Ideally, each patient should also undergo either an endoscopic ultrasound or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in order to more precisely assess both tumor depth and the presence of adjacent lymph nodes. Both ultrasound and MRI have been found on meta-analysis to be more sensitive than CT for determining depth of tumor invasion on pre-treatment examination, while all three modalities had similar sensitivity and specificity in determining lymph node involvement (5).