LOS ANGELES – Clinical staging of T2N0 esophageal cancer remains unreliable, despite advances in staging techniques, a study has shown.
The addition of endoscopic ultrasound and PET/CT has improved the ability to clinically stage esophageal cancer overall, but clinical staging of T2N0 disease has generally been less reliable than staging of more advanced disease. The subset of patients with T2N0 disease, which accounts for only a small portion of esophageal resections, has been a difficult group to study because single-center investigations involve a limited number of patients, Dr. Traves D. Crabtree said at the annual meeting of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS), in the prestigious Richard E. Clark Paper for General Thoracic Surgery.
Courtesy Martin Allred
Dr. Traves D. Crabtree
Dr. Crabtree of Washington University, St. Louis, and his colleagues examined the adequacy of clinical staging of T2N0 disease using the STS General Thoracic Surgery Database.
The researchers identified 810 patients clinically staged as T2N0 from 2002 to 2011 and excluded 58 because of inadequate pathologic staging data. Clinical stage, pathologic stage, and preoperative characteristics were recorded for each patient and multivariable analysis was used to identify factors associated with upstaging at the time of surgery.
Among 752 patients with clinically staged T2N0, the investigators found that 482 went directly to surgery. Of these, 27.4% (132) were confirmed as pathologic T2N0. A total of 25.9% (125) were downstaged (T1N0), while 46.7% (225) were upstaged (T3-4N0 or TanyN1-3). Tumor depth (pT3-4) accounted for 18.2% of upstaging while nodal upstaging occurred in approximately 82%. When logistic regression was used, male sex was associated with upstaging (odds ratio = 1.85, P = .024). By analyzing the part of the database that included tumor grade (between the years 2009 and 2011), the investigators found that a higher histologic grade was significantly associated with upstaging (P = .004).
"Over one-third of surgeons have opted to treat T2N0 disease with induction therapy, despite the fact that one-quarter of these patients will be pT1N0," he said.
"This is the first large-scale multi-institutional study of clinical T2N0 patients using the STS General Thoracic Surgery Database. These data highlight the inaccuracy associated with clinical staging of T2N0 esophageal cancer and may influence the surgeon’s decision-making process in choosing a treatment regimen for these patients," Dr. Crabtree added in an interview.
"Given the current limitations of clinical staging of T2N0 patients, the incidence of occult nodal disease, and the similar perioperative outcomes among patients treated with and without induction therapy, these patients may more likely be treated with induction therapy in the future. Additional studies are needed to compare long-term outcomes between patients receiving induction therapy, vs. those clinical T2N0 patients going directly to surgery, before a definitive recommendation can be made," he concluded.
Dr. Crabtree reported that he had no relevant financial disclosures.