Hypertension predicts a poor prognosis in patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma

BACKGROUND: We investigated the relationship between the preoperative hypertension and prognosis of esophageal squamous cell cancer (ESCC) patients who had underwent esophagectomy. RESULTS: We detected 52% patients with hypertension, including 317 patients with newly diagnosed hypertension and 194 patients with history of hypertension. Compared with patients of normal blood pressure, all patients with hypertension and newly diagnosed hypertension were observed to have worse overall and ESCC-specific survival outcome (p < 0.05). After adjusted in multivariate Cox regression analysis, hypertension (HR: 1.343, 95% CI: 1.064, 1.695; HR: 1.315, 95% CI: 1.039, 1.664) and newly diagnosed hypertension (HR: 1.414, 95% CI: 1.095, 1.826; HR: 1.420, 95% CI: 1.098, 1.836) were inversely associated with overall and ESCC-specific survival outcome, respectively. While no association was found between history of hypertension and overall or ESCC-specific survival outcome (HR: 1.229, 95% CI: 0.892, 1.694; HR: 1.132, 95% CI: 0.812, 1.578). CONCLUSIONS: Hypertension was an independent risk factor and resulted in inferior prognosis for ESCC patients who had underwent esophagectomy. METHODS: A total of 982 ESCC patients who had underwent esophagectomy from August 2010 to December 2015 were enrolled in our study with a follow up of 6 years. The Kaplan-Meier method and log-rank test were respectively used to calculate and compare survival rate, and Cox proportional hazards regression model was applied to identify independent prognostic factors.