Background: Early esophagogastric junction (EGJ) cancer is currently being treated in the same way as early gastric cancer, by endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD), but long-term outcomes are still unknown. Our aim was to retrospectively evaluate the safety and efficacy of ESD in treating early EGJ cancer and compare risk factors in curative and non-curative resection cases.
Methods: Forty-four cases of early EGJ cancer, defined as a Siewert's type II tumor, in 44 patients with a mean age of 70.0 years and a male/female ratio of 90.9:9.1 % were treated by ESD between January 2004 and June 2010. There were 30 standard indication cases; the remaining 14 cases were expanded indication cases.
Results: Mean resected specimen and tumor sizes were 35 and 17 mm, respectively, and median procedure time was 121 min, with no bleeding or perforation complications. All cases were resected en bloc with an 84.1 % curative resection rate (37/44). The curative resection rates in the standard and expanded indication cases were 90.0 % (27/30) and 71.4 % (10/14), respectively. There were no significant differences in tumor location, tumor morphology, tumor size, histology of biopsy specimens, or standard versus expanded indication cases with regard to risk factors for curative and non-curative resections. However, submucosal invasion, positive tumor margins, lymphovascular invasion, and some components of poorly differentiated adenocarcinomas in just the submucosal layer were significantly more common in the non-curative resection cases.
Conclusions: ESD was a safe, effective, and minimally invasive treatment for early EGJ cancer. For tumors without any submucosal invasion findings, therefore, ESD is an acceptable treatment option, in addition to also being suitable for diagnostic purposes in evaluating the need for surgery.