Prognostic significance of extracapsular spread in isolated neck recurrences in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma patients

Few studies have analyzed the appearance of extracapsular spread (ECS) in salvage neck dissections carried out after regional recurrence of the disease. The aim of our study was to evaluate the frequency of ECS in patients with an isolated regional recurrence treated with a salvage neck dissection, and to assess the influence of ECS on prognosis. We conducted a retrospective study of 123 patients treated with a salvage neck dissection. Eighty-two patients (66.7 %) had nodes with ECS. Five-year salvage-specific survival for patients without ECS was 77.2 %, whereas for patients with ECS it was 32.0 % (P = 0.0001). According to the results of a multivariate analysis, the presence of ECS in the salvage neck dissection was the only variable significantly related to the salvage-specific survival. Sixty-six percent of the patients with nodes with ECS had adjuvant treatment with radiotherapy or chemoradiotherapy. Five-year salvage-specific survival for patients with ECS who had not received adjuvant treatment (n = 26) was 15.2 %, whereas for patients treated with adjuvant radiotherapy (n = 39) or chemotherapy (n = 17), 5-year salvage-specific survival was 36.4 and 47.1 %, respectively. Patients with ECS could benefit from adjuvant treatment with radiotherapy or chemoradiotherapy.