[Esophageal carcinoma -- current status in diagnosis and therapy]

Esophageal carcinoma is characterized by an increasing incidence in the last 15 years whereas the prognosis still remains almost invariably poor. The therapy of choice is still deemed to be surgical resection including extended lymphadenectomy which is accompanied by considerable amounts of peri- and postoperative complications and only rare long-time survival. Precursor lesions and early stage cancers are therefore increasingly often treated by local ablative procedures including mucosectomy, which demonstrates promising results. In advanced tumor stages definitive chemoradiation provided long-term survival equivalent to that in contemporary surgical series and thus represents another alternative to tumor resection. This review points out the epidemiology, aetiology, staging and consequences in therapy for esophageal carcinoma considering current points of view.