Esophageal cancer treatment today is very invasive and not optimized. Although it represents only about 1% of all cancer cases it is important to find better diagnostic and surgical methods: most cancer cases are detected in an advanced stage, where a curative therapy is meaningless or impossible while cases with curative care have only about 40% 5-year survival rate among all age groups and sexes, which drops to about 10-20% without any cure at all. Because of this doctors often have to rely on palliative therapy to ensure a good quality of life for the patient. A very effective method to understand the patients needs and how to ensure a good living standard for those people is through questionnaires.
This paper will focus on the impact of the ivor lewis esophagectomy on patients’ lives for further research and curative care development based on research done at the Klinikum rechts der Isar with patients diagnosed with either squamous cell carcinoma or adenocarcinoma of the esophagus and underwent an abdominothoracic esophagectomy with reconstruction with gastric elevation.