Maarten van Egmond

72 Chapter 4 RESULTS Between March 2012 and October 2015, 226 patients with a resectable esophageal carcinoma (cT0-4aN0-3M0) were eligible for this study. Finally, 125 patients agreed to be measured on muscle strength before neoadjuvant chemoradiation and a tertiary referral center subsequently referred them to the physiotherapy department. From these 125 patients, 93 CT-scans were eligible to compute muscle surface areas. Reasons for exclusion of the CT-scans were: No high dose CT available in portal phase on level L3 (n = 17), not able to assess due to low dose CT (n = 10), L3 was not properly scanned (n = 1), muscle was not fully depicted on CT (n = 2), CT was taken in wrong phase (n = 1) and CT could not be taken from server for analysis (n = 1). Therefore, we finally included 93 patients for statistical analysis. The majority of patients were male (82.8%) and mean age (SD) was 61.1 years (9.4). BMI was (mean, [SD] 25.9 [54.2]) and 3 out of 93 individuals (3.2%) had a nasogastric feeding tube preoperatively. Pulmonary function was better than predicted (100 %) with a forced vital capacity (FVC) of (mean percentage, [SD]) 115.3 (16.5), forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1) of 107.2 (19.5) and inspiratory vital capacity (IVC) of 111.3 (15.8) respectively (Table 1). Table 1. Baseline patient characteristics a (N = 93 patients) Characteristics Total (N = 93) a Male (n = 77) b Female (n = 16) b Age, y 61.1 (9.4) 61.5 (17.0) 59.4 (15.0) Height, cm 176.2 (8.0) 178.0 (10.0) 169.0 (9.5) Weight, kg 80.5 (14.9) 82.1 (21.6) 67.4 (19.3) Body mass index, kg/m 2 25.9 (4.2) 25.8 (5.6) 23.9 (6.3) < 19 3 (3.2) c 3 (3.9) c - 19.1-25 39 (40.9) c 30 (39) c 9 (56.3) c 25.1-30 38 (40.0) c 33 (42.9) c 5 (31.3) c > 30.1 13 (14.0) c 11 (14.3) c 2 (12.5) c Comorbidities Cardiovascular 20 (21.5) c 19 (24.7) c 1 (6.3) c Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease 7 (7.5) c 6 (7.8) c 1 (6.3) c Diabetes mellitus type II 3 (3.2) c 2 (2.6) c 1 (6.3) c Muscle surface area at L3, cm 2 151.5 (31.9) 159.8 (36.8) 106.5 (15.9) L3 muscle index, cm 2 /m 2 76.4 (12.8) 79.6 (14.5) 59.6.(9.5) Pulmonary function, percentage of predicted Forced vital capacity 115.3 (16.5) 116.5 (19.7) 111.8 (35.4) Forced expiratory volume 1 second 107.2 (19.5) 109.7 (23.2) 102.2 (36.5) Inspiratory vital capacity 111.3 (15.8) 111.4 (19.2) 103.3 (29.8) a Mean (standard deviation) is shown b Median (interquartile range) is shown c Number (percentage) is shown