Locally advanced esophageal cancer may have a better outcome if radiation therapy is augmented by nutritional support. Nutritional support was associated with significantly better survival compared with patients given IV fluids or those who did not get nutritional or fluid support, Jeffrey Haynes, M.D., of the University of Pennsylvania, reported at the Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium.
Weight loss of five pounds or more predicted worse survival.
The findings should be interpreted cautiously because the study was retrospective and because nutritional supplements and IV fluids were given at physician discretion, he added.
Nutritional support during chemoradiation has been shown to improve outcomes in other types of cancer. Those observations provided the impetus for the retrospective review.
The analysis included 132 patients treated with curative-intent radiotherapy. In 77% of the cases, patients were given oral or enteral nutritional supplements during radiation therapy, and 38% received IV fluids. Median follow-up was 14.1 months, and median survival from the end of radiation therapy was 1.5 years. Compared with nutritional support alone, IV fluids with or without nutritional support doubled the hazard ratio for mortality. Patients who received neither nutritional support nor IV fluids also had a significantly higher mortality risk compared with the patients who received only nutritional support.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
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