Factors associated with local-regional failure after definitive chemoradiation for locally advanced esophageal cancer.

Abstract

e14669 Background: Esophageal cancer is often treated with a trimodality approach (chemotherapy and radiation followed by surgery). However a significant proportion of such patients achieve a clinical complete response (cCR) following chemoradiation alone. We retrospectively analyzed patients who reached cCR after definitive chemoradiation for locally advanced esophageal cancer to identify clinical predictors of local disease recurrence. Methods: We identified 141 patients who obtained initial cCR after definitive chemoradiation for esophageal cancer from January 2002 through January 2009. The initial response to treatment was assessed by endoscopic evaluation and biopsy results, with cCR defined as having no evidence of disease present. Patterns of failure were categorized as in-field (within the planned treatment volume [PTV]), outside the radiation treatment field, or both. Results: At a median follow-up of 22 months (range 6-87 months), 77 patients (55%) had experienced disease recurrence. Most first failures (32, or 23%) were outside the radiation field, followed by 30 (21%) within the field and 15 (11%) were both. In multivariate analysis, in-field failure after cCR was associated with a post-treatment standardized uptake value (SUV) on positron emission tomography of >3.5 (odds ratio [OR] 4.93, p=0.022), squamous histology (OR 0.07, p=0.010), and borderline for T3/T4 disease (OR 10.25, p=0.055). All failures, in-field and out-of-field, correlated with T3/T4 disease (OR 11.61, p=0.015), N1 disease (OR 5.07, p=0.010), pretreatment SUV >10 (OR 4.00, p=0.048), and post-treatment SUV >3.5 (OR 3.59, p=0.052). Conclusions: Clinical characteristics can be used to predict failure patterns after definitive chemoradiation. Such risk-assessment strategies can help individualize therapy.