A Prospective Clinical Trial of Endoscopic Nasopharyngectomy for Newly Diagnosed Stage I Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Patients

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is most prevalent in eastern Asia, with the highest incidence reported among the Cantonese population from the province of Guangdong. Radiotherapy is the cornerstone of initial treatment due to the radiosensitive behavior of NPC and its deep-seated location. Although radiotherapy has achieved satisfactory results, it can also cause some severe adverse events. Currently, surgery is only applied to the treatment of recurrent NPC (rNPC) patients, mainly dominated by the conventional open surgery. However, the traditional surgery was accompanied by high rate of treatment-induced complications and low rate of block removal, which greatly limited the surgical application to the treatment of primary NPC.

With the continuous improvement in surgical techniques, especially the electronic endoscopic system to be used in the surgical treatment recently, endoscopic nasopharyngectomy can largely overcome these shortcomings of traditional surgery mentioned above.

In addition, the investigators retrospectively analyzed the survival outcomes of 9 patients with NPC (all T1N0M0 according to the UICC / AJCC seventh staging) treated with endoscopic nasopharyngectomy in our hospital, with 5-year rate of overall survival, loco-regional-free survival, distant metastasis-free survival of 100%. Therefore, the investigators considered endoscopic nasopharyngectomy for staged I NPC patients feasible.

This study will focus on the survival outcomes and quality of life of the staged I NPC patients treated with endoscopic nasopharyngectomy.