Laryngeal Cancer Recurrence Patterns

From our institutional database of patients diagnosed with laryngeal cancer between January 1980 and December 2021, we retrospectively extracted patients who experienced a locoregional recurrence after initial treatment for early glottic cancer, collecting their clinical and pathological information, such as age at first diagnosis, sex, smoking and alcohol abuse status, initial TNM stage at diagnosis, type of initial treatment (e.g., radiotherapy, transoral laser surgery, partial or total laryngectomy), disease-free interval, follow-up period, and cause of death. For each recurrence, we retrieved the rTNM, CLRSS, and CLRSS-2 stages, the chosen salvage treatment, distant metastases, and disease-free interval.
We included patients with an initial early glottic cancer (T1-T2 patients according to the 8th edition of the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC), without lymph node involvement) [15 ] who had experienced recurrent disease after a disease-free interval of at least 3 months, and with a histological diagnosis of squamous-cell carcinoma. We excluded non-squamous-cell histology, patients who underwent a palliative treatment without curative intent, and patients with incomplete data.
The follow-up protocol, both for primary tumors and recurrences, was conducted by the medical staff (seniors and residents in otolaryngology) of our department, and it usually consisted of direct/indirect laryngoscopy every 4–8 weeks for the first 2 years, every 3 months for the 3rd year, every 6 months during the 4th and 5th years, and then once a year.