Objective: This article summarizes the research progress on the association of dietary habits with esophageal cancer (EC), with the aim of gaining a better understanding of lifestyle, dietary, and drug-related risk factors as well as protective factors of EC.
Background: EC is one of the most common malignant cancers and has a high mortality rate. Evidence has suggested that dietary habits are closely related to EC. Several researches refer to the issue of the relationship between dietary habits and EC, but rare of them summary systematically and comprehensively. It is of great importance to study the role of dietary habits in the etiology of EC for the prevention and treatment of this disease.
Methods: We searched the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), PubMed, Medline and EMBASE databases to identify studies on the association of dietary habits with EC published between the databases' dates of inception and March 2021.
Conclusions: This comprehensive review summarizes the state-of-the-art research findings on the association between dietary habits and EC, with the literature we obtained revealing that dietary habits have been increasingly regarded as potential etiologies or protective factors of EC, which reinforce the importance of suitable planning of interventions to reduce the burden of this disease among the population.
Keywords: Esophageal cancer (EC); dietary habits; food; risk factor.