Sun T, et al. – Analysts undertook this work to gauge the clinicopathological and prognostic significance of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in patients with head and neck cancer. The significant prognostic value of CTCs had been confirmed in these patients. They suggested the use of CTCs as a monitoring tool for tumor status of head and neck cancer, especially for the early detection of the tumor recurrence and progression, advanced disease and the node metastasis.

Methods

• In this work, two authors systematically searched the studies independently with keywords in PubMed, MEDLINE, EMBASE, Science Citation Index Expanded and Cochrane Library (from inception to February 2017).
• They set the estimated hazard ratio (HR), risk ratio (RR) and their 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) as effect measures.
• STATA 12.0 performed all analyses.

Results

• This meta-analysis incorporated a total of 17 studies.
• A significant association of positive CTCs with poor overall survival (HR =2.80, 95% CI: 1.34–5.86), disease-free survival (HR =3.86, 95% CI: 2.03–7.36) and progression-free survival (HR =3.31, 95% CI: 1.71–6.42), was noticed.
• It was reported that CTC-positive patients tended to had higher recurrence (RR =2.13, 95% CI: 1.26–3.59) and regional lymph node metastasis (RR =1.18, 95% CI: 1.02–1.36) rate and a more advanced tumor stage (RR =1.16, 95% CI: 1.03–1.32).