%0 Journal Article
%T Prognostic value of tumor length in predicting survival for patients with esophageal cancer
%A Haijing Wang
%A Liangwen Bi
%A Lizhen Zhang
%A Min Yang
%A Weiyong Zhao
%A Xinchen Sun
%J SCIE-indexed Journal
%D 2018
%R 10.21037/21270
%X Esophageal cancer, which caused a total of 400,200 deaths in 2012, is the sixth leading cause of cancer death worldwide (1). Despite recent improvements in multimodal treatment, the 5-year relative survival rate was 41% for patients with localized stage, 23% for patients with regional stage, and only 5% for patients with distant stage esophageal cancer in the United States (2). Thus, an effective staging system is crucial for esophageal cancer patients in terms of determining the proper multidisciplinary therapy and estimating prognosis. Currently the T classification of the 7th TNM staging system (3) depends only on the depth of the primary tumor; furthermore, the 8th edition (4), which was placed into effect in January 2018, still does not consider tumor length. Several authors have recently investigated the importance of tumor length on overall survival (OS) for esophageal cancer patients (5-10). However, almost all of these studies focused on patients with early or regional stage cancer; patients with distant stage cancer were not included. In addition, most conclusions were analyzed based on a small number of patients
%U http://tcr.amegroups.com/article/view/21270/html