The history of lymphadenectomy for esophageal cancer and the future prospects for esophageal cancer surgery

I would herein like to look back upon surgery for esophageal cancer, particularly on lymphadenectomy, and to speculate a little on the future prospects for esophageal surgery. There are two schools of thought on lymphadenectomy in esophageal cancer: one believes in en bloc esophagectomy, which is commonly performed in Western countries; the other believes in three-field lymphadenectomy, which is commonly performed in Japan. We esophageal surgeons at Kurume University have contributed to some advances in three-field lymphadenectomy. For example, we initiated functional mediastinal dissection to ensure patient safety, and we proposed the lymph node compartment theory to assess the clinical importance of regional nodes. Oncological surgery has progressed in terms of its safety, radicality and functional preservation, leading to improved quality-of-life for patients after surgery. This then evolved to the current development of multimodal and individualized tailor-made treatments. I believe that surgery for esophageal cancer will become bipolarized in the future. One strand will evolve as salvage surgery for residual or recurrent tumors, which non-surgical therapies have failed to cure, and the other strand will evolve as less invasive surgery, adjuvant surgery, for cancers at the relatively early stage, for which micro-metastasis can be cured by non-surgical therapies.