Combined chemoradiation vs radiation therapy alone in stage-II nasopharyngeal carcinoma: A meta-analysis of the published literature.

The aim of this meta-analysis was to evaluate the efficacy and toxicity of adding chemotherapy to radiotherapy (RT) in the treatment of stage-II nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). We searched Pubmed, Cochrane Library, Embase, China National Knowledge Internet, China Biology Medicine, VIP, and Wanfang database for studies of the RT with or without chemotherapy in patients with stage-II NPC that were published in any language. Analyses were carried out using RevMan 5.3 software. The relative risk was used to evaluate the data, the I2 test was used to compare heterogeneity, sensitivity analysis was used to evaluate the stability and reliability of the results. There were 16 studies with 3038 patients that were included in this analysis. Risk ratios (RR) of 1.04 (95% CI: 1.01-1.06), 1.05 (95% CI: 1.00-1.10), 1.05 (95% CI: 1.02-1.07), and 1.00 (95% CI: 0.97-1.03) were observed for overall survival (OS), progression-free survival (PFS), locoregional failure-free survival (LRFS), and distant metastasis-free survival (DMFS). Subgroup analysis showed that compared with conventional RT alone, chemoradiation (CRT) could significantly improve OS (RR = 1.09, 95% CI: 1.03-1.15), PFS (RR = 1.20, 95% CI: 1.08-1.35), and LRFS (RR = 1.09, 95% CI: 1.04-1.14), but did not significantly improve the rate of DMFS (RR = 1.03, 95% CI: 0.94-1.12). However, compared with intensity modulated radiation therapy alone, CRT did not significantly improve the rate of OS (RR = 1.01, 95% CI: 0.99-1.03), PFS (RR = 0.99, 95% CI: 0.95-1.03), LRFS (RR = 1.02, 95% CI: 0.99-1.05), and DMFS (RR = 0.99, 95% CI: 0.96-1.01). Compared with conventional RT alone, CRT could significantly improve patients' prognoses in terms of OS, PFS, and LRFS for stage-II NPC, but not DMFS, and CRT can provide greater benefits from concurrent chemotherapy than neoadjuvant chemotherapy. With intensity modulated radiation therapy, the stage-II NPC patients did not benefit from the addition of chemotherapy.