ABSTRACT
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.
ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE: The increasing frequency of colorectal cancer in Asian countries, which have traditionally had a lower incidence than populations in developed countries, and a lower age of onset in Iran led us to perform a study on patients with colorectal cancer to investigate the clinical features of colorectal cancer in Iranians. METHODS: We studied 977 consecutive cases of colorectal cancer in terms of age, gender, and anatomic location during a 15-year period (1989-2004). The patients were hospitalized in three referral hospitals affiliated to Shahid Beheshti Medical University in Tehran, Iran. Related data were extracted from the patients' medical records and processed using SPSS ver. 12. Most of our patients (251 cases or 25.6%) were between 60 and 69 years of age. We recorded 534 men (54.3%) and 443 women (45.7%). A total of 36% of patients were between 40 and 59 years and 306 patients (31.32%) had rectal cancer. RESULTS: The highest frequency of colorectal cancer in our study belonged to an age group a decade younger than the range mentioned in the literature for populations in developed societies. CONCLUSION: Regarding similar studies, it seems reasonable to adopt screening a decade earlier for Iranian patients.
