ORIGINAL ARTICLE   

Minerva Chirurgica 2020 August;75(4):266-71

DOI: 10.23736/S0026-4733.20.08246-2

Copyright © 2020 EDIZIONI MINERVA MEDICA

lingua: Inglese

Tumor length-to-height ratio as a predictor of recurrent laryngeal nerve lymph node metastasis in patients with thoracic esophageal squamous cell carcinoma

Shi-Fa ZHANG ✉, Guang-Hua ZHOU, Hai-Bo CAI

Department of Thoracic Surgery, Jining No.1 Hospital, Jining, China

BACKGROUND: The metastasis of laryngeal nerve lymph node is mostly found in the upper-and middle esophageal cancer, the ratio of esophageal length from the upper incisors to the position where the esophageal tumor began to appear as proven via endoscopy to the height (LH) is likely to affect the possibility of detection of recurrent laryngeal nerve(RLN) lymph node (LN) metastasis. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the predictive value of LH for RLN LN metastasis.
METHODS: One hundred and eighty-eight patients (mean age: 64.89 years; range: 46-84 years) calculated LH before esophagectomy and LN dissection were retrospective analyzed. The clinicopathological data of the patients, LH calculations were compared with the RLN LN histopathologic results to investigate the effect of LH on the diagnosis of RLN LN metastasis.
RESULTS: The LH correlated with that of the RLN LN metastasis in receiver-operating-characteristic (ROC) analysis. Our ROC analyses demonstrated the optimal cut-off value was 16.66 for LH with an area under the curve value of 0.69. Compared with the Height (H) and L, ROC curve for LH have better performance in predicting the RLN LN metastasis.
CONCLUSIONS: LH is a useful predictive tool in the evaluation of RLN LN metastasis for esophageal cancer. The present findings support the result that LH can be an indicator of RLN LN dissection.

KEY WORDS: Recurrent laryngeal nerve; Lymph node; Squamous cell carcinoma; Neoplasm metastasis