| Objective The thesis aims to explore the changes of QOL (Quality of Life) as well as the influential factors of chemotherapy in esophageal cancer patients who are treated with neo-adjuvant chemotherapy, adjuvant chemotherapy and palliative chemotherapy and also to provide the clinicians with an effective tool to evaluate such patients' QOL.Methods The patients with esophageal cancer from the First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University from November 1, 2004 to December 31, 2005 were treated with neo-adjuvant chemotherapy (N=68), adjuvant chemotherapy (N=41) or palliative chemotherapy (N=24). The chemotherapy plan was CF 100mg/d, 5-Fluorouracil 500mg/d, Cisplatin 20mg/d from the first day to fifth day. For the patients to neo-adjuvant chemotherapy the lesion length of esophagus was evaluated by barium meal X-ray film and the effectiveness was also evaluated by RECIST and the clinical stages were determined in combination with CT. As to the patients to palliative chemotherapy the effectiveness was evaluated by CT or barium meal X-ray film. KPS, Stooler's dysphagia score, newly-interpreted QLQ-C30 and QLQ-OES18 were adopted to assess the changes of patients' QOL at all levels and the results could be processed by t-test and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA).Results Given the effectiveness of chemotherapy, the patients' QOL all declined slightly after the first week, that was affected prominently by chemotherapy-related nausea, vomiting and the diarrhea, but returned to the baseline level at the end of the fourth week. The score of physical function, role function and global health status in patients who was responded to chemotherapy (36.8%) began to improve after the first...
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