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OESOPHAGUS CANCER


Overview


The oesophagus or food pipe that carries food from your mouth to your stomach. It is about 26 cm long in adults passing through the chest, on its way to the stomach, it lies between the windpipe (trachea) and spinal cord.

The oesophagus has three main sections – the upper, middle and lower. Cancer can develop anywhere along the length of the oesophagus. The wall of the oesophagus has several layers, called the mucosa, submucosa and muscularis, that help to push food down towards the stomach when you swallow.

The oesophagus joins to the top part of the stomach (called the cardia). There is a valve here that helps to keep the stomach contents from coming back up into the oesophagus. The valve is called the cardiac sphincter.

The oesophagus carries food and liquids to the stomach using waves of muscle contractions. Glands in the wall of the oesophagus produce mucus to help food slide down more easily when swallowing. These glands can become cancerous to produce adenocarcinoma of the oesophagus, which is the most common type of cancer seen in Western countries. The other common type is squamous cell carcinoma.

Statistics


In Australia over 1,000 people are diagnosed with oesophageal cancer each year and a similar number will also die of the disease.

What we are doing to improve treatments


We are conducting three clinical trials to test new combinations of chemotherapy for oesophageal cancer, and working to initiate a new trial. These trials are:
  1. ATTAX 3 – To identify a new treatment combination of chemotherapy +/– a targeted therapy for patients with advanced oesophageal or gastric cancer that is more effective and less toxic than current treatments

  2. ATTAX – Assessing two treatments for people with advanced stomach or oesophageal cancer

  3. ATTAX 2 – A follow-on study for some people enrolled in the ATTAX study.