Prognostic histological markers in oral tongue squamous cell carcinoma patients treated with (chemo)radiotherapy

Abstract

Treatment of oral tongue squamous cell carcinoma (OTSCC) frequently includes surgery with postoperative radiotherapy (RT) or chemoradiotherapy (CRT). Resistance to RT or CRT remains a major clinical challenge and highlights the need to identify predictive markers for it. We included 71 OTSCC patients treated with surgery combined with RT or CRT. We evaluated the association between tumor budding, tumor-stroma ratio (TSR), depth of invasion (DOI), tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), hypoxia-inducible factor-1alpha (HIF-1alpha) expression, octamer-binding transcription factor 4 (OCT4) expression, high-endothelial venules (HEVs), and disease-free survival (DFS) using uni-and multivariate analyses. No significant association was observed between the different histological and molecular markers (TSR, DOI, TILs, HEV, HIF-1alph, OCT4) and DFS. However, an associative trend between DOI, budding, and DFS was noted. Further studies with larger cohorts are needed to explore the prognostic value of DOI and budding for OTSCC patients treated with postoperative RT or CRT.

Intratumoral high endothelial venules in solid tumors: a pooled study

“…Geographically, these studies were conducted in six countries (4 in Korea, 4 in France, 2 in China, 1 in Hungary, 1 in Japan, and 1 in Finland). The types of cancers in the enrolled studies were gastric cancer ( 12 , 19 , 21 ), head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) ( 16 , 20 , 26 ), breast cancer ( 10 , 17 ), melanoma ( 18 , 23 ), esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) ( 22 ), colorectal cancer ( 25 ), and endometrial cancer ( 24 ), respectively. Nine of the 13 included studies investigated the correlation between clinicopathological parameters and TA-HEVs (sex, 6 studies; histological grade, 4 studies; LVI, 3 studies; clinical stage, 3 studies; invasion of depth, 6 studies; lymph node status, 6 studies; distant metastasis status, 3 studies);.…”