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Doctors diagnose head and neck cancer in more than forty-thousand Americans each year. And specialists sometimes prescribe a two-part offense, including radiation therapy and lymph node surgery, to get rid of the malignancy. But University of Florida oncologists say some patients may be going under the knife unnecessarily. U-F doctors studied more than five-hundred head and neck cancer patients. Some received radiation and then had lymph nodes removed. Others did not undergo surgery. In two-thirds of the surgery patients, the nodes removed were actually cancer free. Now the researchers have developed a way to assess C-T scans taken a month after patients receive radiation therapy, to reliably predict whether lymph nodes in the neck are cancer-free and can therefore be spared from surgery.

Dr. Stanley Liauw / UF cancer specialist Liauw:

“Using a lot of aggressive procedures, meaning combining surgery with radiation therapy, is not always necessary, and it’s important for us to identify which patients we can spare that unnecessary surgery.”

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U-F doctors say of thirty-three patients who were spared neck surgery based on their C-T scan, only one experienced a recurrence of the disease. But the rapid diagnosis of recurrence still allowed surgeons enough time to operate and effectively remove that patient’s cancerous lymph nodes. Researchers say helping people avoid needless surgery…and its potential risks and side effects…is the number one benefit to this extra diagnostic step.

Dr. Stanley Liauw / UF cancer specialist Liauw:

“People who have surgery after radiation therapy often have some potential side effects, including neck fibrosis, which means thickening of the neck, restricting their range of motion, wound complications, a long time for healing, which could all affect their quality of life.”

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At the University of Florida Health Science Center, I’m Mike Garrison.