الفهرس 
EPIDEMIOLOGYOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Cancer oral tongue represents about 2% from all new cancer cases, 60% from the oral cavity cancers which is a part from the head and neck cancers; the fifth most common cancer worldwide.
In our study we reviewed the medical records of 58 patients to collect epidemiological and clinico-pathological data, including age, sex, ECOG performance status, comorbidities, special habits, tumor characteristics, surgery, post-operative treatment, locally advanced or metastatic disease treatment, treatment response, mortality rate and survival parameters including: overall survival (OS), disease free survival (DFS) and progression free survival (PFS).
In our study: the median age of the patients was 55 years (range: 32-80). Male to female ratio was 1: 1. (36.2%) of the patients were known to be smokers. The majority of our patients (84.5%) had good ECOG performance status (≤ 1). (31.6%) of the patients were presented to us with stage IV disease. The most common symptom at presentation was unhealing tongue ulcer in (70.7%) of the patients.
As regard treatment in patients; our results showed that surgery followed by adjuvant concurrent chemo radiotherapy improved DFS in twenty nine patients out of forty three patients (67.4%) who were treated with curative intent rather than surgery alone and it was statistically significant (p=0.045).62.8% of the patients who underwent surgical removal of the primary tumor underwent neck dissection.
62.8% of the patients who underwent surgical removal of the primary tumor had free surgical margins while (37.2%) of them had close (less than 0.5 cm) or positive surgical margins. This may be due to the unqualified surgeons who were general surgeons not oncology surgeons.
Although LN dissection especially in advanced cases and surgical margins status are well known to affect DFS, in our study results; LN dissection and surgical margins status didn‘t appear to improve DFS and it was statistically insignificant (p=0.060), (p=0.887) respectively.
At the time of study; our results showed that palliative treatment improved PFS in ten patients out of fourteen (71.4%) with metastatic or locally advanced cancer oral tongue.