RESUMEN
Objective: To compare the clinical features and prognoses of patients with oropharyngeal or hypopharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) with and without retropharyngeal lymph node metastases. Methods: PubMed, Cochrane, Web of Science, CNKI, VIP and Wanfang databases were searched for published literatures on retropharyngeal lymph node metastasis of oropharyngeal or hypopharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (1900, 2021), and outcome indicators such as survival rate and related clinical features were extracted. The quality evaluation of the included literatures was carried out. RevMan 5.4 and Stata 16.0 software were used for data analysis. Results: A total of 18 literatures were included. Meta analysis showed that 3-year and 5-year survival rates and 5-year disease-specific survival rate of patients with oropharyngeal or hypopharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma with retropharyngeal lymph node metastases were lower than those without metastases, 46.1% vs. 53.0%, 40.8% vs. 62.5% and 35.9% vs. 53.1%, respectively, and the differences were statistically significant (OR values were 0.26, 0.38, 0.38, and 95%CI were 0.10-0.69, 0.28-0.51, 0.23-0.65, respectively, all P values<0.05). There were statistically significant differences in clinical stage (III-IV), T stage (T3+T4), N stage (N2), positive cervical lymph node metastases and number of lymph node metastases (≥3) between the two groups (OR values were 4.28, 2.20, 2.88, 10.83, 6.53, and 95%CI were 1.70-10.74, 1.35-3.58, 1.90-4.34, 3.57-32.95, 1.75-24.38, respectively, all P<0.05). The sensitivity and specificity of preoperative imaging for diagnosing retropharyngeal lymph nodes metastases were respectively 0.72 (95%CI=0.54-0.85) and 0.98 (95%CI=0.74-1.00), and the area under curve (AUC) of summary receiver operating characteristic curve (SROC) was 0.84 (95%CI=0.80-0.87). Conclusions: The survival rate of patients with oropharyngeal or hypopharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma with retropharyngeal lymph node metastasis is significantly reduced, the clinical stage and T stage are late, and the cervical lymph node metastasis rate is high. Retropharyngeal lymph node metastasis is more insidious, the sensitivity of preoperative imaging diagnosis is not high.