Esophageal Cancer: Should Gender Be Considered as an Influential Factor for Patient Safety in Drug Treatment?

AIM: Analyze the gender difference of esophageal cancer patients in response to drug treatment. METHODS: All publications on clinical trials were collected from PubMed, Scopus, and PMC. Each publication was examined to determine whether the publication is a clinical trial and whether data on gender difference were reported. RESULTS: Selected from a total of 191 publications, data from 7 trials with a total of 2041 patients were evaluated for gender differences. These clinical trials involve different drugs and disease phenotype. A significant difference was obtained between male and female groups from Student's t-test. There is no conclusive result on age, ethnicity, tumor size, and drug influence. CONCLUSIONS: Gender difference in response to treatment potentially most likely exists in esophageal cancer patients, regardless of age, race, and drugs.