Assessment of a predictive score for pulmonary complications in cancer patients after esophagectomy.

Background: Esophagectomy is a very important method for the treatment of resectable esophageal cancer, which carries a high rate of morbidity and mortality. This study was undertaken to assess the predictive score proposed by Ferguson et al for pulmonary complications after esophagectomy for patients with cancer.

Methods: The data of patients who admitted to the intensive care unit after transthoracic esophagectomy at Cancer Hospital of Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College between September 2008 and October 2010 were retrospectively reviewed.

Results: Two hundred and seventeen patients were analyzed and 129 (59.4%) of them had postoperative pulmonary complications. Risk scores varied from 0 to 12 in all patients. The risk scores of patients with postoperative pulmonary complications were higher than those of patients without postoperative pulmonary complications (7.27±2.50 vs. 6.82±2.67; P=0.203). There was no significant difference in the incidence of postoperative pulmonary complications as well as in the increase of risk scores (χ (2)=5.477, P=0.242). The area under the curve of predictive score was 0.539±0.040 (95%CI 0.461 to 0.618; P=0.324) in predicting the risk of pulmonary complications in patients after esophagectomy.

Conclusion: In this study, the predictive power of the risk score proposed by Ferguson et al was poor in discriminating whether there were postoperative pulmonary complications after esophagectomy for cancer patients.