Adjuvant Radiotherapy for Patients With Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma After R0 Resection

Surgery is one of the most important curative approaches for esophageal cancer. In real-world clinical practice, over 50% of the patients receiving surgical resection as primary management. For patients treated with surgical resection without adjuvant therapy, the probability of local-regional recurrence ranged from 23.0% to 56.5%, accounting for 55.6%-84.5% of the disease recurrence. Once encountering disease recurrence, the subsequent prognosis could be dismal. The median survival time after postoperative disease recurrence ranged from 3 to 8 months. Postoperative radiotherapy (PORT) was one of the potential topical treatment approaches prolonging local-regional recurrence time or moreover, attaining superior disease-free survival (DFS) or overall survival (OS) in selected patients. It is essential to identify patients potentially benefit from PORT. Besides, there were few studies evaluating the impact of postoperative radiation dose to survival outcomes in patients receiving PORT. Whether the PORT-related local-regional recurrence free survival (LRFS) enhancement could convert to OS or DFS improvement is still vague. The current study aimed at evaluating the value of PORT in patients diagnosed with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma after R0 resection.