Palliative Approaches in Esophageal Cancer

Esophageal cancer is a lethal disease and its incidence is still increasing. Despite significant progress in diagnosis and therapy in recent years, esophageal cancer remains a devastating disease in the world. Early diagnosis is difficult, since dysphagia, the common presentation symptom, occurs in late stage of the disease. When diagnosed, many patients miss the opportunity for surgical therapy. Also, patients with esophageal cancer are usually elder with co-mobility which make them not candidates for very invasive esophagectomy. Therefore, palliative endoscopic therapy is used very frequently for patients with esophageal cancer. Among the current endoscopic modalities, some, such as cryotherapy, radiofrequency ablation, etc., can be very effective in controlling the progress of the disease. Some, such as dilation and esophageal stent placement, are really palliative only. The common methods, including cryotherapy, radiofrequency ablation, and stent placement, are introduced in detail in this chapter.