| Abstract: | ![]()
The records of 340 patients treated surgically over the 20 year period 1950 through 1969 at this clinic for primary epidermoid carcinoma of the anterior two-thirds of the tongue were reviewed to evaluate the effectiveness of elective versus therapeutic radical neck dissection in their treatment. There has been a change in the clinical presentation of this disease, with more people presenting at an earlier stage, with a smaller primary lesion and fewer cervical node metastases. The over-all survival rate has shown a marked improvement to 69 per cent at five years. The proportion of women afflicted has increased. The status of the cervical nodes is a major prognostic factor, the determining five year survival rate being reduced from 78 to 26 per cent if the nodes are metastatically involved. It cannot be directly proved that removal of occult metastasis to the neck by elective radical neck dissection before nodes are clinically detectable leads to a better survival rate partly because the two groups being compared are selected and not randomly assigned. However, the marked tendency for carcinoma of the tongue to metastasize regionally at some time in its course, the significant error in clinical evaluation of the neck, the significant conversion of clinically negative nodes to positive in patients not treated with radical neck dissection, the poor prognosis after treatment of conversion from clinically negative into positive and the fact that more than half of the deaths are due to uncontrolled disease of the neck alone, make us strongly favor the principle of elective radical neck dissection to enhance the survival time in the group of patients without clinical evidence of nodal involvement. With current surgical expertise, the mortality and morbidity rates of simultaneous radical neck dissection are low, and the potential benefit of the procedure outweighs its potential risks. Obviously, elective radical neck dissection, if beneficial, would most likely be so in patients with the highest likelihood of having occult metastasis. |
