[A case of metachronous triple cancer treated with a multimodal approach including surgical resection]

We report a patient with metachronous triple cancer of the hypopharynx, esophagus, and tongue. A 37-year-old man with hypopharyngeal cancer underwent hypopharyngolaryngectomy and cervical lymphadenectomy in 1999. Submental lymphadenectomy following adjuvant radiotherapy was performed for lymph node recurrence in 2000. The patient then underwent esophagectomy for esophageal cancer in 2004. Subsequently, the patient underwent 2 partial resections and 1 subtotal resection of the tongue for tongue cancer in 2005, 2007, and 2008, respectively. The pathological findings for each cancer were squamous cell carcinoma. Two rounds of radiotherapy were performed for bone metastasis of the esophageal cancer and for the local recurrence of the tongue cancer. A total of 7 lines of chemotherapy, including superselective arterial infusion chemotherapy, were administered to treat the recurrences. The patient died in 2013, but he showed long-term survival of 13 years from the first operation owing to the multimodality treatment.