How to treat recurrence of esophageal cancer

How to treat recurrent esophageal cancer? Recurrent esophageal cancer is closely related to post-treatment care, diet, and conditioning. Some residual cancer cells after surgical treatment will not be detected in routine tests until they multiply to hundreds of millions. When doctors tell cancer patients that they no longer have cancer cells in their bodies after treatment, in fact, this only means that the test cannot detect cancer cells because their number has not reached a detectable level.

Recurrence of esophageal cancer still needs treatment, and the specific method is chemotherapy. The cell proliferation cycle of esophageal cancer is about 7 days, and the theoretical doubling time is about 10 days, which is slightly longer than the normal esophageal epithelial cell cycle, so there are fewer proliferative cells and more non-proliferative cells. Therefore, although there are many chemical drugs currently used for esophageal cancer, few of them are really effective.

The most commonly used drugs are bleomycin (BLM), doxorubicin (ADM), 5-fluorouracil (5-Fu), methotrexate (MTX), lomustine (CCNU), imipramine (MGAG), vinblastine alkaloids (VDS), etoposide (VP-16) and cisplatin (DDP). The remission rate of single-drug chemotherapy is 15% to 20%, and the remission period is 1-4 months. Most combined chemotherapy regimens use DDP and BLM as the main combination chemotherapy regimens, with most effective rates exceeding 30clo and a remission period of about 6 months.

Combination chemotherapy is not only used for advanced esophageal cancer, but also for combined treatment with surgery and radiotherapy. Currently, the commonly used combination chemotherapy regimens in clinical practice include DDP-BLM, BLM-ADM, DDP-VDS-BLM, and DDP-ADM-5-Fu. Clinical observations have found that chemotherapy drugs such as DDP, 5-Fu and BLM have radiosensitizing effects. In the past 10 years, these chemotherapy drugs have been used as sensitizers in combination with radiotherapy to treat esophageal cancer, and have achieved encouraging results.

The above is some information about how to treat esophageal cancer recurrence. The recurrence rate of esophageal cancer varies from case to case, so everyone should pay attention.