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Surgery With or Without Postoperative Radiation Therapy for Early-stage External Auditory Canal Squamous Cell
Ryohei Oya1, Yukinori Takenaka, Kazuya Takemura
1Department of Otorhinolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery, Osaka General Medical Center, Osaka, Japan.
Objective:
External auditory canal squamous cell carcinoma (EACSCC) is a rare disease with no standard treatment supported by high-level evidence. The aim of this study was to investigate EACSCC prognoses according to treatment modality and thus determine the optimal intervention for early-stage disease.
Data Sources:
PubMed, Scopus, and Ichushi-Web searches of the English and Japanese-language literature published between January 1, 2006 and December 31, 2016 were performed using the key words "external auditory canal cancer" and "temporal bone cancer."
Study Selection:
Articles related to EACSCC that include the 5-year overall survival rate or individual patient data for histological types, follow-up periods, and final outcomes were enrolled.
Data Extraction:
Sex, age, Moody's modified Pittsburgh stage, type of treatment modality, type of operation, follow-up period, and 5-year survival rates were extracted.
Data Synthesis:
Twenty articles were used for the aggregate meta-analysis using a random-effects model, and 18 articles that reported 99 patients with early-stage EACSCC were used for the individual patient data meta-analysis.
Conclusion:
The 5-year overall survival rate of early-stage EACSCC was 77%. Postoperative radiation therapy (PORT) was performed in 45% of stage I patients and 68% of stage II patients. Survival analysis of all patients showed no differences between the surgery-only and PORT groups; however, PORT exhibited a better prognosis than surgery alone among patients with stage I disease (p = 0.003, log-rank test). This result indicated that PORT can be the standard therapy for stages I and II EACSCC.
