Hypertension predicts a poor prognosis in patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma

// Jie Liang 1 , Guodong Li 1, 2 , Jun Xu 3 , Tong Wang 5 , Yanyan Jia 4 , Qinghua Zhai 1 , Lihua Qiao 4 , Miao Chen 4 , Yajing Guo 4 and Shujun Zhang 4 1 Department of Medical Records and Statistics, Shanxi Provincial Cancer Hospital, Taiyuan, Shanxi, China 2 Department of Hospital Administration, Shanxi Provincial Cancer Hospital, Taiyuan, Shanxi, China 3 Department of General Surgery, Shanxi Provincial Cancer Hospital, Taiyuan, Shanxi, China 4 Department of Medical Records and Follow-up, Shanxi Provincial Cancer Hospital, Taiyuan, Shanxi, China 5 Department of Health Statistics, School of Public Health, Shanxi Medical University, Taiyuan, Shanxi, China Correspondence to: Guodong Li, email: 314350829@qq.com Jun Xu, email: xujun_sxth@sina.com Keywords: ESCC; hypertension; hypoxia; VEGF; esophagectomy Received: June 22, 2017 Accepted: December 21, 2017 Epub: January 01, 2018 Published: March 06, 2018 ABSTRACT Background: We investigated the relationship between the preoperative hypertension and prognosis of esophageal squamous cell cancer (ESCC) patients who had underwent esophagectomy. Results: We detected 52% patients with hypertension, including 317 patients with newly diagnosed hypertension and 194 patients with history of hypertension. Compared with patients of normal blood pressure, all patients with hypertension and newly diagnosed hypertension were observed to have worse overall and ESCC-specific survival outcome ( p < 0.05). After adjusted in multivariate Cox regression analysis, hypertension (HR: 1.343, 95% CI: 1.064, 1.695; HR: 1.315, 95% CI: 1.039, 1.664) and newly diagnosed hypertension (HR: 1.414, 95% CI: 1.095, 1.826; HR: 1.420, 95% CI: 1.098, 1.836) were inversely associated with overall and ESCC-specific survival outcome, respectively. While no association was found between history of hypertension and overall or ESCC-specific survival outcome (HR: 1.229, 95% CI: 0.892, 1.694; HR: 1.132, 95% CI: 0.812, 1.578). Conclusions: Hypertension was an independent risk factor and resulted in inferior prognosis for ESCC patients who had underwent esophagectomy. Methods: A total of 982 ESCC patients who had underwent esophagectomy from August 2010 to December 2015 were enrolled in our study with a follow up of 6 years. The Kaplan-Meier method and log-rank test were respectively used to calculate and compare survival rate, and Cox proportional hazards regression model was applied to identify independent prognostic factors.