Frailty Assessed by the Clinical Frailty Scale is Associated with Prognosis After Esophagectomy.

Background: The Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS) is a simple and validated tool for assessing frailty, and higher CFS scores are correlated with worse perioperative outcomes after cardiovascular surgery. However, the relationship between the CFS scores and postoperative outcomes after esophagectomy remain unclear.

Methods: We retrospectively analyzed data from 561 patients with esophageal cancer (EC) who underwent resection from August 2010 to August 2020. We defined a CFS score of ≥4 as indicative of frailty; thus, patients were classified into frail patients (CFS scores of ≥4) and non-frail patients (CFS scores of ≤3). The Kaplan-Meier method was used to describe the overall survival (OS) distributions with the log-rank test.

Results: Of the 561 patients, 90 (16%) had frailty and 471 (84%) did not. Frail patients had a significantly older age, lower body mass index, higher American Society of Anesthesiologists physical status classification, and greater cancer progression than non-frail patients. The 5-year survival rate was 68% in non-frail patients and 52% in frail patients. OS was significantly shorter in frail than non-frail patients (p = 0.017 by log-rank test). In particular, OS was significantly shorter in frail patients with clinical stage I-II EC (p = 0.0024 by log-rank test) but was not correlated with frailty in patients with clinical stage III-IV EC (p = 0.87 by log-rank test).

Conclusions: Preoperative frailty was associated with shorter OS after resection of EC. The CFS score may be a prognostic biomarker for patients with EC, especially early-stage EC.