Prognostic determinants and a new view of staging for patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma.

There is no agreement on the single best staging system for patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma. We have evaluated prospectively several staging systems and have assessed the predictive value of many variables on survival and found that the most important are extensive tumor within the nasopharynx or regional extension, nodes in the lower portion of the neck, and cranial nerve involvement. Other variables that have not been used in traditional extent of disease staging systems but that have an adverse bearing on survival have been studied by multiple regression techniques in the Cox proportional hazards model. Two prognostic scores, which can be used for classifying patients into survival groups, ranging from excellent survival (low score) to poor survival (high score), have also been presented. With these schemes, patients who are at high risk for recurrence after conventional therapy can be reliably selected.