The surgery of the oesophageal carcinoma is subjected today to a renewed interest. In the objective to draw recommendations for the clinicians wishing to include quality of life measures in clinical trials, it seemed pertinent to us to critically review existing studies. The review of the literature, presented here, is based on a bibliographic research using Medline database (January 1986-December 1996). A precise methodology was adopted to read the eighteen articles retained and the psychometric instruments used in each study were listed and classified. Nine studies considered the issue of quality of life but failed to measure the outcome or used not validated psychometric instruments and 4 others used only indicators of physical performance. Only five studies assessed quality of life using instruments with known psychometric properties (Quality of Life Index of Spitzer, Rotterdam Symptom Checklist and EORTC QLQ-C30 questionnaire) more often associated to ad hoc dysphagia scales. This review of literature shows that the inclusion of validated quality of life measures in the surgery of oesophageal carcinoma is very recent and that it presents some difficulties inherent to the lack of specific tools. The EORTC QLQ-OES24, specific of oesophageal cancer, being not yet validated in french, the authors recommend the use of the EORTC QLQ-C30 jointly with ad hoc dysphagia scales.