The development and external validation of simplified T category classification for nasopharyngeal carcinoma to improve the prognostic value in the intensity-modulated radiotherapy era.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) provides excellent local control in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). We investigated whether simplifying 8th American Joint Committee on Cancer staging system T categories improves prognostic value.

Methods

We used 2191 NPC patients as a training set and 414 patients separately as an independent, external validation cohort.

Results

In the training set, local relapse-free survival (LRFS), disease-free survival (DFS), and overall survival (OS) were not significantly different between the 8th edition T2/T3 (P = 0.610, 0.380 and 0.353, respectively). Merging T2 and T3 to proposed T2 (proT2) provided significant differences in LRFS, DFS, and OS between proposed T categories. Proposed T categories had similar c-indices for L

SUBMITTER: Tang LL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6536995 | biostudies-literature | 2019 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature