Nasopharyngeal carcinomaStaging of nasopharyngeal carcinoma investigated by magnetic resonance imaging
Section snippets
Patients
From October 1992 to September 2000, 159 non-disseminated biopsy-proven NPC patients were studied with MRI before treatment: 120 patients were male and 39 female, ranging in age from 14 to 75 years (median age, 47 years). Because of no supraclavicular fossa node metastasis in our series, N stage was defined according to which has more extensive invasion range, retropharyngeal nodes (RN) and cervical nodes (CN). We defined those nodes as abnormal if diameter of CN was larger than 1 cm or RN
Results
Until last follow-up, 40 patients had died. The 1-, 3-, and 5-year OS were 98.7, 85.1, and 77.4%, respectively. Twenty-eight patients presented with recurrence, including 16 in the primary site, 10 in regional node, 2 in both. The 1-, 3-, and 5-year LFF were 97.5, 88.0, and 84.0%, respectively. Thirty-three patients presented with distant metastasis, the most site involved was bone (19 patients), followed by lung (12 patients), liver (9 patients), and others (9 patients). Seven patients were
Discussion
The tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) classification is a worldwide benchmark for reporting the extent of malignant disease and is a major prognostic factor in predicting the outcome of patients with cancer [9]. In 1997, The AJCC fifth edition [8] represented the first concerted effort to design a universally acceptable system by incorporating the strengths of different TNM systems. Thus far, evaluations of the system consistently confirm its superiority over previous systems, in terms of improved
Acknowledgements
We thank Dr Senqing Chen for his helpful review of the manuscript.
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