Segment-specific patterns of regional lymph-node metastasis in primary small-cell carcinoma of the esophagus: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Table 1 Surgical cohorts included in the patient-level pathologic lymph-node metastasis prevalence meta-analysis

Ref.	Setting	Patients	Node-positive patients	Crude prevalence	Role in synthesis
Wu et al[11]	Limited-stage Chinese surgical series	21	15	71.4%	Small surgical denominator; directionally useful
Xu et al[8]	Retrospective resected SCCE cohort	125	60	48.0%	Patient-level and dissected-node denominator
Liu et al[9]	Detailed thoracic SCCE station-level cohort	147	100	68.0%	Main peer-reviewed station-level anchor
CHiSCEC[13]	Multicenter preprint with surgical denominator	286	177	61.9%	Largest denominator; interpreted cautiously
Random-effects synthesis	Logit-transformed proportions	579	352	61.1% pooled	95%CI: 51.4% to 70.0%; I² = 76.4%

SCCE: Small cell carcinoma of the esophagus.