First Thirty Oesophagectomies - An Audit of Surgical Outcomes from Regional Cancer Centre, Coimbatore

Background: Esophageal cancer is one of the common gastrointestinal tract malignancy with a poor prognosis. Its incidence has been increasing for past three decades. This particular cancer poses challenges to treatment and currently, multimodality treatment is advocated, of which surgery is one of the main component. However, Esophagectomy is a complex surgical procedure with significant morbidity and mortality. We studied the outcome of esophagectomy performed in our centre. Materials and methods: We retrospectively collected the data of patients who underwent esophagectomy between September 2013 to September 2015 from the medical records. The demographics, intraoperative and postoperative factors were analysed. Results: The female sex was the major cohort. Lower esophagus and squamous histology were the predominant subtypes.71 % underwent upfront surgery. Transhiatal was the preferred procedure almost in all except one. The predominant postoperative morbidity were pulmonary morbidity (23 %) followed by anastomotic leak and stricture. Our mortality rate was 7.5 %. Conclusion: Our regional cancer centre is on the way to become a high volume centre. The morbidity and mortality profile our centre is almost on par with that of the high volume centre and there is a scope for improvement.