Dr Munir Tarazi – Imperial College London
Lasting Symptoms after Oesophageal Resection (LASER)
“They recently undertook a multi-centre European study including 800 Oesophageal Cancer survivors across 20 centres to identify the key long-term symptoms that have the greatest impact upon patient quality of life (Lasting Symptoms after Oesophageal Resection (LASER) study). They identified that 67% of patients experienced symptoms in the preceding 6 months associated with previous surgery. Through this study, they also identified a large degree of heterogeneity in the way these symptoms are classified by patients and clinicians.
With these results, they performed a 2 round Delphi consensus of experts in the treatment of Oesophageal Cancer patients and in health-related quality of life including oesophageal surgeons, medical oncologists, gastroenterologist, physiotherapists, cancer nurse specialists, and dieticians to provide standardized definitions of key long-term symptoms and severity of symptoms following esophagectomy for cancer. Furthermore, they developed management pathways to guide investigations and management of these symptoms.
They are holding a consensus workshop of key stakeholders to discuss the results of the Delphi study and management pathways. We would like to explore patients’ opinions and experts’ approval on the final flow of the management pathways and decision tool developed. We hope that you will share our enthusiasm for this project.”
