Efficacy of Chemoradiotherapy on Health-Related Quality of Life in Esophageal Cancer Patients with Dysphagia

INTRODUCTION: Esophageal cancer is diagnosed with more than 480,000 patients per year and this disease became the eighth most common cancer worldwide. AIM: In this study, we tried to investigate the role of chemoradiotherapy in decreasing the severity of dysphagia and increasing the quality of life (QOL) in patients with esophageal cancer. METHODS: Patients were diagnosed with esophageal cancer, which were proven by pathological studies. Also, all of these patients had no primary surgeries for their esophageal cancer. For determining the cancer staging, the endoscopy, sonography, abdominal and pelvic computed tomography scans were assessed. RESULTS: In this study, 81% of patients showed responsiveness to the chemoradiotherapy and their dysphagia significantly was getting improved after treatment in comparison to the initial date (P<0.01). Also, the pain score significantly decreased after chemoradiotherapy. However, the analysis failed to show any significant difference between before and after treatment in 19% of patients who had high degrees of dysphagia and they were the candidate for surgery and stent putting. On the other hand, we demonstrated that there is no correlation between sex, age, tumor type and location with the recovery rate of dysphagia. In addition, we showed that none of the patients showed the recurrence of dysphagia during the study (1.5 years). CONCLUSION: Chemoradiotherapy could be a novel treatment for patients with inoperable esophageal cancer to reduce the severity of dysphagia and increasing the QOL of these individuals.