2020 Volume 32 Issue 4 Pages 180-185
In Japan, 60％ of patients aged 70 years or older are newly diagnosed with cancer. Since the aging process is generally heterogeneous, there are difficulties in evaluating elderly patients based only on age. Therefore, new treatment outcomes and general assessment tools for selecting treatment strategies in older patients with oral squamous cell carcinoma （OSCC） will need to be established. In this study, the clinical significance of healthy life expectancy and the G8 screening tool were investigated in elderly OSCC patients. It seems that in patients with advanced cancers, healthy life expectancy was poor （less than 1 year）, except among patients aged 75-79 years who received standard treatments. In elderly patients, healthy life expectancy （self-reliance survival time） may be one of the measures for patient prognosis as well as overall survival time. A lower G8 score was associated with poorer self-reliance survival. The clinical significance of the G8 score for elderly OSCC patients was demonstrated and its combination with ECOG-PS may be useful for assessing their prognoses.
