During the past 23 years, from June 1989 to December 2012, our treatment paradigm for head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) had involved comprehensive use of chemotherapy and radiation therapy followed by surgery.
Between 1989 and 2005, chemotherapy using fluorouracil and carboplatin had been administered via intravenous drip infusion as induction chemotherapy (ICT), and more recently between 2006 and 2012 as concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CCRT).
In the present study, we examined the superiority of definitive CCRT (dCCRT) over the ICT followed by definitive radiotherapy (ICT-dRT) as to the impact on the treatment of HNSCC with the stage-categories of T2-T4a, retrospectively analyzing survival rates and laryngeal preservation rates at the 3-year point between the two groups. The number of patients assigned for this study was 76, all of whom were previously untreated, and of whom 51 suffered from laryngeal carcinoma and 25 from hypopharyngeal carcinoma: 21 with Stage II, 25 with Stage III, 23 with Stage IVA, 7 with Stage IVC.
The three-year overall survival rate and cause-specific survival rate were 54.5%, 73.5% in the ICT-dRT group and 69.2%, 80.5% in the dCCRT group, respectively, both of which statistically had no difference. But the dCCRT was found to contribute to obtaining a higher rate of laryngeal preservation than that of the ICT-dRT in T2 and T3 but not in T4a.
In conclusion, dCCRT showed more significant efficacy for organ preservation on T2 and T3 HNSCC than ICT-dRT.