ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE: This study evaluated treatment strategies for head and neck cancers in a predominantly African American population. METHODS: Data were collected utilizing medical records and the tumour registry at the Howard University Hospital. Kaplan-Meier method was used for survival analysis and Cox proportional hazards regression analysis predicted the hazard of death. RESULTS: Analysis revealed that the main treatment strategy was radiation combined with platinum for all stages except stage I. Cetuximab was employed in only 1% of cases. Kaplan-Meier analysis revealed stage II patients had poorer outcome than stage IV while Cox proportional hazard regression analysis (p = 0.4662) showed that stage I had a significantly lower hazard of death than stage IV (HR = 0.314; p = 0.0272). Contributory factors included tobacco and alcohol but body mass index (BMI) was inversely related to hazard of death. CONCLUSIONS: There was no difference in survival using any treatment modality for African Americans.
Subject(s)
Black or African American , Carcinoma, Squamous Cell/ethnology , Carcinoma, Squamous Cell/therapy , Head and Neck Neoplasms/ethnology , Head and Neck Neoplasms/therapy , Laryngeal Neoplasms/ethnology , Pharyngeal Neoplasms/ethnology , Aged , Carcinoma, Squamous Cell/mortality , Female , Head and Neck Neoplasms/mortality , Humans , Kaplan-Meier Estimate , Laryngeal Neoplasms/therapy , Male , Middle Aged , Pharyngeal Neoplasms/therapy , Proportional Hazards Models , Retrospective Studies , Squamous Cell Carcinoma of Head and NeckABSTRACT
The authors report the development of an electric oxygen-iodine laser with higher output using a larger product of gain and gain length, g0L. A factor of 4.4 increase in laser power output on the 1315 nm atomic iodine transition was achieved with a factor of 3 increase in gain length. I(2P1/2) is pumped using energy transferred from O2(a1Δ) produced by flowing a gas mixture of O2-He-NO through three coaxial geometry radio-frequency discharges. Continuous wave (CW) average total laser power of 481 W was extracted with g0L=0.042.
