[Digestive tract cancer: after ten years in Santa Fe]

In our earlier paper we found that esophageal cancer was the most frequent localization among all the digestive tract cancers. Furthermore, in four departments belonging to our province we also observed a colon-esophagus relationship of virtually 1 to 1. In this study we aimed to: 1) estimate the prevalence of esophagus and stomach tumors: a) in the Endoscopy Department, b) in all the hospital, comparing it with colon cancer and, c) as causes of death in our region of influence, in relation to all the neoplastic pathologies. 2) analyze the histological lineage and the anatomical location, according to sex, age and origin. We evaluated: 3,396 upper digestive tract endoscopies, the diagnoses of digestive tract cancer from the Histopathology Service, the discharges from hospital as the result of digestive tract cancer from the General Archives, all of them from Cullen Hospital, and death register of the province of Santa Fe accounting for digestive tract cancer. A descriptive analysis was carried out and spreadsheet from the Open Office 2.2 version and SPSS 10.0 version were used. We observed that esophageal cancer is still very frequent in the Endoscopy Department and in the Histopathology Service but not in the diagnoses at discharge from hospital. It shares similar epidemiological features to the ones observed in the international literature. The reduction of the relationship between colon and esophageal cancer in the global mortality rate of the country turns out to be surprising. In three departments situated on the north of the province it was observed a colon-esophagus cancer relationship of 1:1.