Introduction:

the advanced-stage esophagus cancer is one of the most aggressive cancers. In Cuba, it is in the tenth place among the death reasons.

Objective:

to clinically and pathologically characterize the patients with esophageal cancer diagnosed in the mentioned hospital.

Materials and methods:

a prospective-descriptive study was carried out based on the clinical-histological characterization of 59 patients with the endoscopic and histological diagnosis of esophageal cancer in the Hospital “Faustino Pérez Hernández”, of Matanzas, in the period from January 2016 to December 2017. The studied variables were: age group, sex, personal and familiar pathological antecedents, risk factors, symptoms and signs that were predominant in the diagnosis, time passed since the symptoms appeared, endoscopic kind, location, histological kind, level of histological differentiation, disease stage, kind of treatment, and life time after the diagnosis.

Results:

male sex predominated (88.1 %) in patients older than 60 years (52.6 %). Dysphagia, asthenia and anorexia were the most frequent signs. Alcoholism and smoking were the predominant risk factors. The most frequent anatomic location was the middle third (54.3 %); the endoscopic vegetating kind (88.1 %) and the histological kind well-differentiated epidermoid carcinoma (55.9 %) prevailed. The authors found a relation between the beginnings of the symptoms 3 to 6 months before the diagnosis and the disease IV stage predominating in 29 patients (49.2 %). Most of patients underwent oncologic treatment combined with palliative surgery (47.5 %) or no treatment (45.8 %), because 50.8 % of the patients died a month after the diagnosis, showing that the diagnosis of esophageal cancer is almost always achieved at advanced stages of the disease, when few therapeutic options are possible.

Conclusions:

esophageal cancer is still being diagnosed late, in advanced stages, with a higher prevalence of the epidermoid carcinoma over the adenocarcinoma. It indicates few health preventive actions on the risk factors among the studied population. There is a relation between the disease advanced stage and the few time patients live after the diagnosis.

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