Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Type 2 diabetes is associated with an increased risk of cancer and with reduced survival in several types of cancer. However, data for upper aerodigestive tract carcinoma are limited.

Objective: Our aim of this report is to study the impact of diabetes on survival among patients with upper aerodigestive tract squamous cell carcinoma.

Material and Methods: A retrospective study of 130 patients treated for upper aerodigestive tract squamous cell carcinoma, between 1992 and 2019. Nasopharyngeal, nasal cavity and paranasal sinus carcinomas are excluded. We used the Kaplan–Meier method to calculate the cumulative proportion surviving. Survival curves were compared by log-rank test (P<0.05 for statistical significance). We used the Cox regression model for multivariate analysis.

Results: Our study included 117 men and 13 women. The mean age was 59 years. The tumor sites were: larynx (100 cases), hypopharynx (20 cases), tongue (9 cases) and lip (1 case). Twenty-nine patients (22.3%) had type 2 diabetes mellitus. No patient had type 1 diabetes mellitus. Five-year overall survival was 62.1% for nondiabetic group compared with 55.4% for diabetic group. There was no statistically significant difference between the 2 groups (P=0.77). Five-year disease-free survival was 60.8% for nondiabetic group compared with 54.7% for diabetic group, without significant difference (P=0.63). Multivariate analysis of overall and disease-free survival did not demonstrate a statistically significant difference between the diabetic and nondiabetic groups (P=0.2 for overall survival and P=0.7 for disease-free survival).

Conclusion: The impact of diabetes on survival in upper aerodigestive tract squamous cell carcinoma is controversial in the literature. Our results demonstrate that there is not a difference statistically significant in overall or disease-free survival among non-diabetic and type 2 diabetes mellitus patients.