The Clinical Characteristics and Prognostic Nomogram for Head and Neck Cancer Patients with Bone Metastasis

Head and neck cancer (HNC) is the sixth most common malignancy globally, and many demographics and clinicopathological factors influence its prognosis. This study aimed to construct and validate a prognostic nomogram to predict the prognosis of HNC patients with bone metastasis (BM).

A total of 326 patients with BM from HNC were collected from the SEER database as the subjects of this study. In a ratio of 7 to 3, patients were randomly divided into training and validation groups. Independent prognostic factors for HNC patients with BM were identified by univariate and multivariate Cox regression analysis. The nomogram for predicting the prognosis was constructed, and the model was evaluated by receiver operating characteristic curves, calibration curves, and decision curve analysis.

The independent prognostic factors for HNC patients with BM included age, primary site, lung metastasis, and chemotherapy. The area under the curve predicting overall survival at 12, 24, and 36 months was 0.768, 0.747, and 0.723 in the training group and 0.729, 0.723, and 0.669 in the validation group, respectively. The calibration curves showed good agreement between the predicted and actual values for overall survival. In addition, the decision curve analysis showed that this prognostic nomogram model has a high clinical application.

This study developed and validated a nomogram to predict overall survival in HNC patients with BM. The prognostic nomogram has high accuracy and utility to inform survival estimation and individualized treatment decisions.