Dental intervention against osteoradionecrosis of the jaws in irradiated patients with head and neck malignancy: a single-arm prospective study.

BACKGROUND: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of dental intervention before and after radiation therapy (RT) for head and neck malignancy on prevention of osteoradionecrosis (ORN) of the jaws. METHODS: This is a single-arm prospective study according to intervention protocol of prophylactic dental extraction before RT and routine follow-up after RT. The primary endpoint was the occurrence of jawbone exposure during the first 2 years after RT. RESULTS: Sixty-seven patients were assessed. Before RT, 144 teeth among 39 patients (58%) were prophylactically extracted. The occurrence of transient jawbone exposure during the first 2 years after RT was 7%. Because those jawbone exposures healed with intervention after RT, no jawbone exposure was found at 2 years after RT. CONCLUSIONS: Dental intervention both before and after RT seemed to be important to prevent ORN development. Further studies in larger cohorts are necessary.

Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell-related Genes Correlate With Poor Prognoses of Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma.

BACKGROUND/AIM: We recently investigated the contribution of the iPS-related genes SOX2, OCT4, and Nanog to de-differentiation by assaying for their mRNA levels. Given that mRNA expression does not always correlate with the protein levels, the aim of this study was to retrospectively determine the expression of these four iPS-related factors in human OSCC specimens by immunohistochemistry and examine their association with patient prognosis. MATERIALS AND METHODS: iPS cell-related gene expression in 89 OSCC patients by tissue microarray, and its correlation with clinicopathological factors, differentiation, metastasis, and poor prognoses were investigated. RESULTS: No evidence of statistically significant relationships was found between the expression of iPS cell-related genes and clinicopathological parameters. However, our data indicated that KLF4 expression was associated with survival, and poor tumor differentiation. In addition, high expression of KLF4 was an independent poor prognostic factor (p=0.004) for OSCC patients. CONCLUSION: In preoperative biopsies, higher KLF4 and poor differentiation may be clinically effective predictors for the prognosis of oral cancer.