Evaluation of Time to Surgery and Its Effect on Prognosis in Head and Neck Cancer.

BACKGROUND: Recently, time to treatment initiation has been observed to be increasing specifically for head and neck cancer. It is acknowledged that the pattern of increase is reflective of the use of sophisticated diagnostic and therapeutic techniques but was also determined to affect survival. OBJECTIVES: Our study sought to further investigate time to surgery (TTS) for surgically treated patients to see whether TTS would influence patient survival. METHOD: TTS was defined as the time from the earliest pathological report or scan, whichever was earlier, to surgery. The endpoints were overall survival (OS) and event-free survival (EFS). RESULTS: A total of 294 patients with head and neck cancer were included. Patients were organized into TTS quartiles of 0-14 days (quartile 1), 15-29 days (quartile 2), 30-49 days (quartile 3), and ≥50 days (quartile 4). The median follow-up time was 651 days, and the median TTS was 32 days. Using a univariable analysis of Cox regression, TTS was not significantly associated with OS or EFS. Kaplan-Meier curves were not significant for OS (p = 0.8904) and EFS (p = 0.9556). CONCLUSION: In this cohort study, we could not conclude that TTS was associated with OS or EFS.

Evaluation of the prognostic utility of the combination of platelet count with mean platelet volume as a prognostic indicator in head and neck cancer.

The combination of platelet count to mean platelet volume (COP-MPV) has been recently reported as a prognostic indicator of oral cavity cancer and other cancer sites. The aim of the present study was to validate the utility of the COP-MPV as a prognostic indicator in all head and neck cancer (HNC) sites. The clinicopathological characteristics of the COP-MPV with HNC were also investigated. This is a retrospective cohort study that recruited consecutively treated patients at a tertiary level academic hospital. Clinicopathological characteristics were recorded, including the COP-MPV scores. Survival was analyzed using Kaplan-Meier analysis, as well as multivariate Cox Proportional Hazards regression. COP-MPV was not associated with the survival outcome in univariate or multivariate analysis. In the multivariate model, tumor differentiation, tumor stage, nodal stage, surgical margins and hemoglobin were revealed to be significantly associated with survival. The results demonstrated that the COP-MPV is not a suitable prognostic factor for HNC.