Esophageal cancer treatment keeps pace with technology
7/21/2003 Baltimore MD Shalmali Pal The International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology, and Physics The standard of care for the treatment of esophageal cancer advanced significantly at the close of the 20th century, including the increased use of esophageal ultrasound and a combination of chemoradiation and surgery. "These changes reflect a continual progression of technology into routine clinical practice, as well as a wider acceptance of the results of large randomized trials supporting the role of combined-modality therapy in the management of this disease process," wrote lead author Dr. Mohan Suntharalingam from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology, and Physics (July 2003, Vol. 56:4, pp. 981-987). The paper compared the latest trends in treatment and care to earlier data from the nationwide Patterns of Care Study (PCS). The latter was started in 1971 in an effort to improve the quality and accessibility of radiation oncology in the U.S. The present retrospective study was designed to evaluate patients who received radiotherapy for esophageal cancer from 1996 to 1999 and compare these numbers to PCS data obtained between 1992 and 1994. Suntharalingam’s co-authors are from the American College of Radiology and the University of Pennsylvania, both in Philadelphia; the Community Medical Center in Toms River, NJ; Boston University School of Medicine and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston; the Cancer Center at St. Agnes in Fresno, CA; and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. For this study, site visits took [...]