Treatment outcome of hypopharyngeal cancer: A single institutional experience

Abstract

This retrospective study investigated the treatment outcomes of patients with hypopharyngeal cancer. The study included 100 patients who were treated at our institution from August 2008 to July 2015. The three-year overall survival （OS） rates for Stage 0, Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, and Ⅳ were 100％, 68.6％, 100％, 56.3％, and 42.3％, respectively. An analysis of 82 patients who were treated curatively （median follow-up period: 37 months） revealed that T status was a significant factor for OS and disease-specific survival （DSS）; and N status was significant for DSS and distant metastasis-free survival. The sub-group analysis of the patients with Stage Ⅲ and Ⅳ disease showed that surgery and radiotherapy had comparable oncologic outcomes for T1 and T2 disease, whereas, for T3 and T4 disease, surgery had significantly improved outcome in OS and local control as compared to radiotherapy. Although some previous studies have reported that radiotherapy with concurrent chemotherapy had a comparable outcome to surgery even for advanced hypopharyngeal cancer, especially for T3 disease, the current results were inconsistent with those reports. The discrepancy might be caused by differences in the selection of patients for radiotherapy and in the amount of cumulative cisplatin dose in concurrent chemoradiotherapy.