Page 41 - Sentinel lymph node biopsy in oral cavity cancer - Inne J. den Toom

1.0 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0 Figure 2. Overall survival according to different size of metastasis. The comparison between macrometastasis and SLNB negative patients is statistically significant (p = <0.005), whereas the other comparisons were not statistically significantly different. patients (p = <0.005), whereas the difference in survival rate between patients with a micrometastasis and patients with a macrometastasis or SLNB negative patients was not statistically significantly different. However, these outcomes were partially due to the Bonferroni correction because the comparison between micrometastases and SLNB negative patients was no longer significant (p = 0.028) after this correction (p = 0.17). In addition, no statistical significant differences were observed between the ITC patient group and any other group, probably due to the low number of ITC patients (Figure 2). DISCUSSION In this study we retrospectively evaluated the diagnostic value of SLNB in 90 patients with early stage (T1-T2, cN0) oral cavity squamous cell carcinoma, with follow-up as reference standard. Sensitivity and negative predictive value were 93% and 97%, respectively. Regional recurrence rate of all patients was 6%. The false negative rate was 2/61 (3%), which is comparable to false negative rates in studies of Pezier et al. and Civantos et al. and is relatively low in comparison with other large SLNB trials with false negative rates of 6-9%.14,20-22 However, most of these studies with higher false negative 2 Sentinel lymph nodes negative micro ITC macro Cumulative Overall Survival 0 12 24 36 48 60 72 Follow-up (m) 39