Liu Z, et al. - Researchers intended to offer a more precise and objective evaluation of the prognostic value of pretreatment C-reactive protein/albumin ratio (CAR) in esophageal cancer (EC), and for this purpose, they performed this meta-analysis. They explored PubMed, Embase and the Cochrane Library (last update by April 16, 2019) to identify studies evaluating the role of pre-treatment CAR in the prognosis of EC. They obtained eight observational studies with 2,255 patients. The link of high CAR with worse overall survival (OS) in EC was revealed in the pooled analysis. In subgroup analyses, subgroups stratified by country, pathological type, and cut-off value consistently showed a negative correlation between the CAR and OS. The connection of high CAR with worse cancer-specific survival in EC was also observed. In this study, high pretreatment CAR was identified as an adverse prognostic factor for EC patients. Still, there remains a requirement of more large-sample clinical trials to confirm the prognostic significance of pretreatment CAR in EC.