Abstract
Introduction: Disease free survival is the optimum treatment outcome in cancer management. We explored the impact of age on key treatment outcomes among a group of Sri Lankan oral squamous cell carcinoma patients.
Material & Methods: We studied clinical records of 44 oral squamous cell carcinoma patients consisted of age- matched two groups (22 in each group) who had close surgical margins and clear surgical margins respectively. Of two groups, the first group completed the post-operative adjuvant radiotherapy but second group did not. The follow–up period was 6-months from the primary cancer ablative surgery. Disease frees survival, recurrence and mortality was assessed as prognostic treatment outcomes.
Results: The majority (79.5%) of oral cancer patients survived but 34.1% had recurrences at the end of the follow-up period. The mean ± SD ages of disease-free survivors, survivors with recurrence and non-survivors were 61.6 ± 9.17 years, 56.0 ± 11.08 years and 52.2 ± 9.34 years respectively. The age differences were statistically significant (p=0.04) assessed by ANOVA test.
Conclusion: There could be an impact of age on survival of oral cancer patients as indicated by findings of this study. However, findings of the present study should be interpreted and compared with findings of similar studies cautiously as it had a shorter follow up period which was 6-months from primary surgery and a small sample size of 44. Further studies warranted in this regard.
Keywords
Disease free survival, Recurrence, Mortality, Oral squamous cell carcinoma, Sri Lanka, Age impact