What You Need to Know about Esophageal Cancer

Each year, about 11,000 Americans find out they have cancer of the esophagus. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has prepared this booklet to help patients and their families and friends better understand this type of cancer. We also hope it will encourage others to learn more about this disease.

This booklet has information on the symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer of the esophagus. Other NCI booklets about cancer, its treatment, and living with cancer can be found in the Other Booklets section. However, materials like these cannot answer every question or take the place of talks with doctors, nurses, and other members of the health care team. We hope our booklets will help with those talks.

Throughout this booklet, words that may be new to readers appear in italics. Definitions of these and other terms related to cancer of the esophagus can be found in the Glossary. For some words, a "sounds-like" spelling is also given.

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