The Behavior of Nasopharynx Malignancies: a Retrospective Study in a Ten-Year Sample

Malignant tumors of the nasopharynx make up 3% of malignancies in the ENT area. The most common nasopharyngeal malignancy is nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), followed by lymphomas. Other nasopharyngeal tumors are very rare. In this study, we aimed to assess the age distribution and behavior of the primary nasopharyngeal malignancies, NPC, and lymphoma over a ten-year period in a tertiary hospital patient group.

Retrospective cohort study.

A total of 48 patients participated in this retrospective monocentric study. The group consisted of 13 females (27.1%) and 35 males (72.9%) diagnosed with nasopharyngeal malignancy and treated between 2012 and 2022. The patients' ages ranged from 14 to 83 years, with a mean age of 57.5 and a median of 55 years. The variables monitored in the study were histology, symptoms (such as nasal obstruction, Eustachian tube function, presence of glue ear, neck mass, weight loss), smoking status, TNM classification, and survival.

In NPC grading and staging, two statistically significant variables were found to be associated with survival: distant metastases (p < 0.0001) and stage of the process (p = 0.0153). We did not find age and gender to be significant variables for lymphomas (p = 0.4066; p = 0.1797, respectively) or for NPC (p = 0.8630; p = 0.0573, respectively). Neither did we find any significant cut-off levels. In our analysis of therapy, we discovered that the use of chemoradiotherapy and palliative care in the NPC group is statistically significantly connected with disease-specific survival (p = 0.0094; p = 0.0004). This, however, was not the case in the lymphoma group. For the NPC group, we found statistically significant symptoms only in weight loss (p = 0.0081) and smoking (p = 0.0483).

Our research confirmed that nasopharyngeal tumors are rare, with the most common type being nasopharyngeal carcinoma. In our patient group, 76.9% of cases involved nasopharyngeal cancer, which was five times more common in men than in women, and typically occurred in individuals over the age of 50. Lymphomas and other tumors accounted for less than a quarter of the cases. The overall five-year survival rate for nasopharyngeal malignancies in our group was 42.3%. We also observed an interesting gender perspective: 75% of women (6 women) survived for five years, whereas 72.2% of men died within five years of diagnosis.