Novel calculator more easily identifies patients who will benefit from neoadjuvant chemoradiation

Using the National Cancer Data Base, the Roswell Park team evaluated clinical data for 8,974 patients diagnosed with early-stage esophageal cancer. The database records information for as many as 70% of the nation's cancer cases through participating hospitals. The researchers evaluated characteristics such as patients' comorbidity score, tumor grade and neoadjuvant chemoradiation status (whether they had chemotherapy and/or radiation prior to surgery). Only preoperative data were used to develop the calculator. The scientists found that patients who benefit more from neoadjuvant chemoradiation included those whose tumors had metastasized to nearby lymph nodes, older patients and those with more aggressive cancers, such as tumors of higher grade and greater depth of invasion. These findings indicate that the calculator would assist physicians and patients with treatment decision-making.

"The use of calculators to estimate outcomes is becoming increasingly common, and is being applied to real-time clinical situations to aid in treatment decision-making and individualizing therapy," says the lead author of the study, Emmanuel Gabriel, MD, PhD, of the Department of Surgical Oncology at Roswell Park.

"Our effort is a good example of how you can use large national databases to create calculators to guide and improve preoperative decision-making. Such tools can help us, for example, to avoid the toxic side effects of upfront chemoradiotherapy in a subset of patients. However, our calculator should be validated prospectively before firm conclusions can be drawn about its value in treatment selection," notes the senior author of the study, Moshim Kukar, MD, Assistant Professor of Surgery in the Department of Surgical Oncology at Roswell Park.