[Recent regimen of chemotherapy for advanced head and neck carcinomas]

Standard treatment for squamous cell carcinomas in the head and neck consists of surgery and/or radiotherapy. However, this standard treatment alone has not improved the poor prognosis of advanced head and neck carcinomas. A new curative treatment modality for advanced head and neck carcinomas including chemotherapy with an impact is needed. The clinical results of chemotherapy over the past twenty years have shown chemotherapy including cisplatin (CDDP) and 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) to be the most efficacious for advanced cases. In this paper, the problems with this chemotherapy are discussed in terms of predictive factors of the response to this treatment, and the recent clinical results with chemotherapy including CDDP, 5-FU, and other drugs are reviewed. Furthermore, new chemotherapeutic regimens and the clinical results including commonly applied taxanes, e.g., paclitaxel and docetaxel, are reviewed.