A Clinical Study on 72 Cases of Oropharyngeal Carcinoma

The incidence of oropharyngeal carcinoma has been increasing in Japan. We retrospectively analyzed 72 fresh cases of oropharyngeal carcinoma who were treated between 2005 and 2012 in our department. The subjects were 57 males and 15 females, aged 39 to 84 years with an average of 63.8 years. Sixty-five patients (90.3%) were in stages III/IV. The overall 5-year crude survival, disease-specific survival and local control rates determined by the Kaplan-Meier method were 46.4%, 61.4% and 70.3%, respectively. Both survival and local control rates were significantly higher in patients at T1/2 than in those at T3/4. Of 35 patients at T1/2, 27 (77.1%) were N(+). Twenty-two patients (30.6%) underwent surgery for the primary lesion, and in most of the other 50 patients, complete response of the primary lesion was obtained by chemoradiotherapy without surgery. These results indicate that oropharyngeal carcinomas are prone to metastasize to regional lymph nodes even if the primary lesion is small, but small primary lesions still lead to a good prognosis. The present data also suggested that oropharyngeal carcinomas are highly sensitive to chemoradiotherapy. A better prognosis and functional preservation may be achieved by detecting early primary lesions and distinguishing chemoradiotherapy-sensitive and insensitive cases in the future.