Photodynamic therapy and cancer of the esophagus

Abstract

Esophageal cancer is a tumor that, at diagnosis, is often advanced and not curable. In patients with good operative risk, surgery is still considered the ideal treatment. As many patients are elderly and have complicating serious medical conditions which preclude major resective surgery, endoscopic treatment (endoscopic oncology) has become a recent alternative. The endoscopic approach includes dilation, thermal destruction with Bicap probes, Nd. Yag laser, injection therapy, photodynamic therapy (PDT) and prostheses. This work is focused on photodynamic therapy which is safe but continues to be an experimental treatment. Its role in gastrointestinal malignancies is evolving. Currently the best results are to be expected in early lesions where the treatment could be curative.