Cancer Care Ontario Practice Guidelines Initiative /

The failure of surgery alone is attributed to the systemic nature of the disease at the time of presentation (7,8). [...] The large and growing number of patients affected, the high mortality rates, the geographic variation in practice, and the large body of good quality research evidence warrants the development of a practice guideline for patients with esophageal cancer. [...] Due to the availability of new evidence, particularly in the form of individual patient meta-analysis and meta-analysis of mortality hazard ratios, it was felt that a revision of the literature review and recommendations was required. [...] In addition, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) (formerly the Physician Data Query [PDQ] database on the Internet [ ]) and the conference proceedings of the 1997 to 2007 annual meetings of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the 1999 to 2006 annual meetings of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (ASTRO) were sear [...] New data in the form of RCTs or published meta-analyses since the publication of the original guideline (18,19) were identified for the following comparisons: preoperative radiotherapy versus surgery alone preoperative chemotherapy versus surgery alone preoperative chemoradiotherapy versus surgery alone postoperative chemotherapy versus surgery alone postoperative chemotherapy versus pos