Carcinoma of the external auditory canal is among the rarer forms of head and neck cancer. We retrospectively analyzed the data of 15 cases of carcinoma of the external auditory canal treated at our hospital between January 2009 and December 2018.
The patients consisted of 7 male and 8 female patients, aged 38 to 85 years, with a median age of 66 years. The histopathological type was squamous cell carcinoma in all cases, and the mean follow-up period was 36.2 months (range, 3 to 102 months).
The tumor stage was T1 in 5 cases, T2 in 1 case, T3 in 6 cases, and T4 in 3 cases. There were no cases with lymph node or distant metastasis. According to the Pittsburgh staging classification, 5 patients had Stage I disease, 1 patient had Stage II disease, 6 patients had Stage III disease, and 3 patients had Stage IV disease.
Ten patients underwent surgery as the initial treatment, and 5 patients with positive margins received postoperative chemoradiotherapy. Three patients received super-selective intra-arterial rapid infusion chemotherapy as the initial treatment. Two patients received radiotherapy alone.
The 5-year overall survival and 5-year disease-specific survival rates as evaluated by the Kaplan-Meier method were 57.7% and 72.5%, respectively. The 5-year disease-specific survival rate was 100% in patients with Stage I/II disease, 40.0% in those with Stage III disease, and 50.0% in those with Stage IV disease. Six patients with early-stage disease showed good outcomes with surgery or radiotherapy, but the outcomes became poorer as the disease became more advanced. It is necessary to accumulate a larger number of advanced cases and consider effective treatment methods to improve the treatment outcomes.
