The Value of Chemotherapy in Advanced Carcinoma of Head and Neck

抄録

From our study we like to draw the following conclusions.
1. No significant difference could be detected between group A and group B of our study. In other words, combined chemotherapy does not lead to significantly better results than chemotherapy alone.
2. 73% of all the patients with absolutely inoperable head and neck tumors had partial or complete tumor remission; for patients which tolerated 3 cycles of the chemotherapy the precentage of responders climbed up to even 80%.
3. Tumor remission was always combined with a remarkable relief of the subjektive symptoms such as pain or dysphagia. This is particularly the case in the non-radiated patients of group B.
4. The average survival time of 11 months may indicate that many patients of this study may finally not live longer, but they live definitely better.
5. The therapy success in many of these hopeless cases encourages us to try a combination of our chemotherapy scheme with surgical procedures also in early stage of certain carcinoma to improve their chances of being cured from the tumor.