Prognostic Factors in Patients with Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma

Abstract

From 1971 to 1985 a total of 122 patients with non-distant metastatic nasopharyngeal carcinoma were treated at the Norwegian Radium Hospital with radiation doses that increased from 50 Gy (at 2 Gy/fractions) to 70 Gy (at 2 Gy/fractions) during the treatment period. Possible relationship between the increase in dose and survival time was investigated. The median cancer-specific survival time was 50 months, and the median crude survival time 38 months. No correlation was found between radiation dose and survival time. In a multivariate analysis histology was found to be the most important prognostic factor for survival with a relative risk of death from cancer of 3.4 and 3.2 for non-keratinizing carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma respectively compared with undifferentiated carcinoma. When assessed in terms of N category the relative death risk for N2/N3 was 2.1 compared to N0/N1.

Benefits of local tumor excision and pharyngectomy on the survival of nasopharyngeal carcinoma patients: a retrospective observational study based on SEER database

“…Except for histology (ICD-O-3 code) records, SEER database also recorded the tumor differentiation grade, a much simpler system. Compared to differentiated squamous and non-keratinizing carcinoma, undifferentiated cancer has a significant better survival prognostics due to its high sensitivity to RT and chemotherapy [29]. Table 3 showed that in moderately-differentiated subgroup, surgery patients had significantly lower risk of cancer-specific death than non-surgery group (HR = 0.36, 95% CI 0.16–0.82, p = 0.02).…”

Prognostic significance of expression of vegf and cox‐2 in nasopharyngeal carcinoma and its association with expression of C‐erbB2 and EGFR

“…We included different histologic subclassification groups of WHO tumors; 60 nonkeratinizing carcinomas and nine keratinizing squamous cell carcinomas. Even though the two groups showed different biologic features in many aspects 47, 48, there have been some controversial reports about the difference of OS or treatment response between the two groups according to different geography and different race 49–52. And even the distribution of histologic types and the biologic features of each groups varied with geography 49, 53.…”

Improved outcome of nasopharyngeal carcinoma treated with conventional radiotherapy

“…However, reports concerning consecutive series are more likely to reflect the actual effectiveness of treatments in clinical practice and have provided useful information on a number of other clinical issues, including the impact on outcome of evolving imaging and radiation treatment techniques. Individual institutional reports of patients treated with conventional RT have been published over the past 4 decades (2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15) and have shown a trend for improvement of outcome with time. Most recent reports from North America have shown local control rates approaching 100% and 5-year overall survival (OS) rates approaching 90% after three-dimensional (3D) conformal or intensity-modulated RT (IMRT) (16,17).…”