Current Status of Clinical Staging for Esophageal Cancer in China

Esophageal cancer stage is the important reference basis on the choice of treatment,prognosis assessment and therapeutic effect evaluation.Effective and practical staging standard is always the research hot spot. Although the UICC stage is determined based on the postoperative pathology and recognized as the gold standard,but for the non-surgery esophageal cancer patients,its applicability obviously is limited. At present,domestic commonly used clinical staging is mainly Zhu's staging,cooperation group staging and esophageal cancer GTV staging. The three staging have different standards with T,N,M. Although their effectiveness have validated by some scholars,but aslo some problems in clinical practice were found,and their accuracy is not as good as the pathological staging. In this paper,the development process and research status of esophageal cancer clinical staging in China are reviewed.