Chemotherapy and combined-modality therapy for esophageal cancer.

Treatment of esophageal carcinoma with radiation alone or surgery alone has yielded unsatisfactory cure rates and has not had a major impact on survival. The failure to cure or prolong survival of patients with esophageal cancer is because of our inability to eradicate residual disease at the primary site and to early systemic dissemination of disease. Three neoadjuvant approaches involving chemotherapy have been studied in patients with apparently localized esophageal cancer: preoperative chemotherapy followed by surgery, chemotherapy and concurrent radiation therapy followed by surgery, and chemotherapy and radiation therapy without surgery. All of these approaches have shown potential in pilot trials. Large-scale trials comparing surgery alone with chemotherapy prior to operation are underway. For patients with local-regional epidermoid carcinoma who are not able to undergo or who refuse operation, chemotherapy plus concurrent radiation appears, in random assignment trials, to be superior to radiation alone.