Response to definitive chemoradiotherapy and survival in patients with an oesophageal adenocarcinoma versus squamous cell carcinoma: a matched-pair analysis.

OBJECTIVES: The impact of the histological tumour type in patients treated with definitive chemoradiotherapy (CRT) for an oesophageal cancer is not well established. The aim of this retrospective matched-pair analysis was to evaluate the clinical complete response (CCR) to definitive CRT and the outcome between 2 groups of patients.
METHODS: Fifty-seven patients with an oesophageal adenocarcinoma (ADC) were matched according to the tumour stage and the WHO performance as well as the CRT regimen status including 57 patients with an oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). CRT was based on radiotherapy combined with a cisplatin-based chemotherapy.
RESULTS: A CCR was observed in 40 patients (70.2%) with an SCC as compared with 26 patients (45.6%) with an ADC (p = 0.013). SCC patients received significantly more of planned cisplatin and radiotherapy doses than ADC patients (82.0 vs. 67.7%, p = 0.042, and 92.5 vs. 84.5%, p = 0.023, respectively). In responders to CRT, local recurrence was significantly more frequent in SCC patients (52.5 vs. 26.9%, p = 0.046). Median survival in all patients as well as in responders to CRT was not different between the 2 groups.
CONCLUSION: Our study showed that treatment completion and CCR to definitive CRT were more frequent in SCC with, however, more local recurrences in these patients. Further studies are required to confirm this difference in response rate to definitive CRT according to histological type of the tumour in oesophageal cancer. 2008 S. Karger AG, Basel.