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Updated: Jul 17, 2025
Intraoperative Assessment of Resection Margins in Oral Cavity Cancer: This is the Way
Published on: May 10, 2021
The impact of undergoing surgical margin evaluation during endoscopic surgery for early-stage laryngeal squamous cell
Shivee Gilja1, Arvind Kumar1, Vikram Vasan1
1Department of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York, USA.
Background:
The impact of evaluating versus not evaluating surgical margins for early-stage laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma (LSCC) has not been evaluated.
Methods:
Overall survival was compared between patients who underwent endoscopic surgery for cT1-2, N0, M0 LSCC and had surgical margins evaluated versus not evaluated versus unevaluable in the National Cancer Database (2010-2019) using multivariable-adjusted Cox proportional hazards analyses.
Results:
7597 patients met study eligibility criteria. 4123 (54.3%) patients underwent margin evaluation, 1631 (21.5%) did not undergo margin evaluation, and 1843 (24.3%) had unevaluable margins. Patients undergoing margin evaluation had better overall survival than patients who did not undergo margin evaluation (HR: 0.88, 95% CI: 0.78-1.00, p = 0.044) and patients with unevaluable margins (HR: 0.88, 95% CI: 0.78-0.98, p = 0.021). Patients undergoing margin evaluation received significantly less adjuvant radiation.
Conclusions:
Surgical margin evaluation is an important prognostic factor for patients receiving endoscopic surgery for early-stage LSCC and should be conducted whenever possible.
