Objective To explore the difference of short-term quality of life (QoL) in patients with different width of gastric conduit reconstruction after esophagectomy.

Methods A total of 520 patients who underwent minimally invasive three-incision esophagectomy from January 2018 to December 2019 were included in this study. They were divided into two groups: wide (5 cm) tubular stomach group (n=260) and narrow (3 cm) tubular stomach group (n=260), and the perioperative surgical effect indexes of the two groups were analyzed. The questionnaire QLQ C-30 together with OES-18, developed by the European Organization for Research on Treatment of Cancer were applied to evaluate the QoL of the patients before and 3, 6, 9, 12 months after surgery. The repeated ANOVA test was used for the statistical analysis.

Results The differences in patient demographics after matching such as age, sex, body mass index, comorbidity index, anesthetic risk grade, tumor location, and pTNM stage between the two groups were not statistically significant. No statistical difference was founded on the peri-operative outcomes, such as blood loss, postoperative hospital stay, or morbidity between the two groups. However, the cost of surgical materials was higher in the narrow tubular stomach group (709±0.4vs5.8±0.5 thousand yuan, P=0.000). The QoL scores in baseline were comparable and deteriorated after surgery, but improved gradually with the duration of time. The result of repeated ANOVA analysis revealed that, apart from time effect, the patients in the narrow tubular stomach group had better scores on overall physical condition dyspnoea symptom, coughing symptom, reflux symptom than the wide tubular stomach group (P < 0.05).

Conclusions The narrow gastric conduit reconstruction seems to have better QoL than conventional wide gastric conduit reconstruction.