Esophageal Carcinoma and Associated Risk Factors: A Case-control Study in Two Tertiary Care Hospitals of Kabul, Afghanistan

Purpose: Esophageal cancer (EC) is the most common cancer among males in Afghanistan, thus we aimed to conduct a case-control study to determine the associated risk factors with EC in two tertiary care hospitals of Kabul, Afghanistan. Patients and Methods: We enrolled 132 EC cases and 132 controls and used conditional logistic regression to estimate the odds ratio (OR) with consideration of 95% confidence interval (CI). Results: The results of our study revealed that esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) was the predominant type of EC constituting 75.8% of the cases. The results of the multivariate logistic analysis showed that males and older ages were at increased risk of developing EC (OR: 4.62, 95%CI, p-value=0.026) and (OR: 1.070, 95%CI, p-value