Mortality in tongue cancer patients treated by curative surgery: a retrospective cohort study from CGRD

Background Our study aimed to compare the outcomes of surgical treatment of tongue cancer patients in three different age groups. Methods From 2004 to 2013, we retrospectively analyzed the clinical data of 1,712 patients who were treated in the four institutions constituting the Chang Gung Memorial Hospitals (CGMH). We divided and studied the patients in three age groups: Group 1, younger (<65 years); Group 2, young old (65 to <75); and Group 3, older old patients (≥75 years). Results Multivariate analyses determined the unfavorable, independent prognostic factors of overall survival to be male sex, older age, advanced stage, advanced T, N classifications, and surgery plus chemotherapy. No significant differences were found in adjusted hazard ratios (HR) of death in early-stage disease (stage I–II) among Group 1 (HR 1.0), Group 2 (HR 1.43, 95% confidence interval (CI) [0.87–2.34], p = 0.158), and Group 3 (HR 1.22, 95% CI [0.49–3.03], p = 0.664) patients. However, amongst advanced-stage patients (stage (III–IV)), Group 3 (HR 2.53, 95% CI [1.46–4.38], p   = 0.001) showed significantly worse survival than the other two groups after other variables were adjusted for. Fourteen out of 21 older old, advanced-staged patients finally died, and most of the mortalities were non-cancerogenic (9/14, 64.3%), and mostly occurred within one year (12/14, 85%) after cancer diagnosis. These non-cancer cause of death included underlying diseases in combination with infection, pneumonia, poor nutrition status, and trauma. Conclusions Our study showed that advanced T classification (T3–4), positive nodal metastasis (N1–3) and poorly differentiated tumor predicted poor survival for all patients. Outcome of early-stage patients (stage I–II) among three age groups were not significantly different. However, for advanced-stage patients (stage III–IV), the older old patients (≥75) had significantly worse survival than the other two patient groups. Therefore, for early-stage patients, age should not deny them to receive optimal treatments. However, older old patients (≥75) with advanced cancer should be comprehensively assessed by geriatric tools before surgical treatment and combined with intensive postoperative care to improve outcome, especially the unfavorable non-cancerogenic mortalities within one year after cancer diagnosis.