Esophageal cancer: Should gender be considered as an influential factor for patient safety in drug treatment?

Abstract

Aim. Analyze the gender difference of esophageal cancer patients in response to drug treatment. Methods. All publications on clinical trials were collected from PubMed, Scopus, and PMC. Each publication was examined to determine whether the publication is a clinical trial and whether data on gender difference were reported. Results. Selected from a total of 191 publications, data from 7 trials with a total of 2041 patients were evaluated for gender differences. These clinical trials involve different drugs and disease phenotype. A significant difference was obtained between male and female groups from Student’s t-test. There is no conclusive result on age, ethnicity, tumor size, and drug influence. Conclusions. Gender difference in response to treatment potentially most likely exists in esophageal cancer patients, regardless of age, race, and drugs.