In the case of a thoracic esophageal cancer that will require extensive volume coverage, >2/3 of the esophagus, do you prophalactically prescribe a feeding tube or observe?

I am not a big fan of stents and working with the University of Utah team we published on this issue (Francis et al., IJROBP 2017). For a series of 103 consecutive patients treated with definitive or neoadjuvant chemoradiation (CRT), of whom 28 had a stent in place during the chemoRT, we found that ...

Getting the patient through treatment is one consideration. Whether or not a prolonged malnutritioned state will affect their longer term outcomes is another. However, if the patient is heading for surgery, it's critical to optimize their pre-albumin levels, since we know that affects perioperative ...

While the use of prophylactic feeding tubes is much better described and debated in the Head and Neck community, there is much less data and discussion (at least to my knowledge) for esophageal chemoradiation. They are fundamentally very different clinical contexts: the radiation dose used in the ne...