Study Assessing The "Best of" Radiotherapy vs the "Best of" Surgery in Patients With Oropharyngeal Carcinoma

Plain-language summary

Oropharyngeal Squamous Cell Carcinoma (OPSCC) arises in the soft palate, tonsils, base of tongue, pharyngeal wall, and the vallecula. Most of the patients with early stage OPSCC are usually cured. Treatment of early stage OPSCC can be successfully achieved with primary surgery including neck dissection, as indicated, or with definitive radiotherapy. The current standard treatment for OPSCC is therefore based on either surgery and/or radiotherapy, both associated with comparable, high tumor control rates but with different side effects profiles and technical constraints. In order to decrease the potential morbidity of surgery, transoral approaches have been developed within the last decades, including transoral robotic surgery (TORS), transoral laser microsurgery (TLM) or conventional transoral techniques. On the other hand, patients with head and neck cancer treated with IMRT experienced significant improvements in cause specific survival (CSS) compared with patients treated with non-IMRT techniques thus suggesting that IMRT may be beneficial in terms of patient's outcomes and toxicity profile. It is as yet unclear however, which one of the new techniques is superior to the other in terms of function preservation. Given that the functional outcome of most importance is swallowing function, the preservation of swallowing is thus of major importance. The main objective of the study is to assess and compare the patient-reported swallowing function over the first year after randomization to either IMRT or TOS among patients with early stage OPSCC, SGSCC, and HPSCC.

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