How long can you live with advanced laryngeal cancer?

How long can one live with advanced laryngeal cancer? Do you know how long can one live with advanced laryngeal cancer? Below we will focus on this question and we will ask an expert to give you an introduction.

Depending on individual constitutions, the same symptoms will have different reactions in different people, which requires clinical judgment! Laryngeal cancer often varies in the early or late onset of symptoms and the severity of the disease due to different types.

The main symptoms are:

1. Hoarseness: It is the earliest symptom of vocal cord cancer, which is often persistent and gradually worsens. The early symptoms of subglottic cancer are not obvious, while hoarseness is a symptom of the later stage.

(ii) Foreign body sensation and pain in the throat: This is often an early symptom of supraglottic cancer. After the cancer ruptures, throat pain may occur, sometimes radiating to the ear on the same side. This is a late symptom.

(III) Coughing and blood in sputum: These symptoms occur after the cancer has ruptured and are common.

(iv) Difficulty breathing: This is a symptom of the later stages of the disease, indicating that the cancer has progressed to the point of blocking the throat.

(V) Cervical lymph node metastasis: It can metastasize to the middle deep cervical lymph nodes on the same side, and may metastasize to the contralateral side in the late stage.

(VI) Laryngoscopy: In the early stage, the vocal cords are thickened, one side is congested, the surface is rough and uneven, and granular protrusions gradually appear on the surface of the vocal cords, and then papillary or cauliflower-like tumors appear. After a while, the movement of the vocal cords is restricted or fixed. In the late stage, it often becomes ulcers and develops to the upper and lower parts of the larynx, invading the adjacent tissues of the larynx, and there is metastasis to the cervical lymph nodes.

Symptoms of laryngeal cancer metastasis

(I) Direct spread: Because the larynx is protected by the thyroid cartilage, it is relatively slow to spread outward. The first way of direct spread is to infiltrate the submucosal membrane along the mucosal surface. Vocal cord cancer mainly spreads backward, forward through the anterior commissure to the opposite vocal cord, and backward to the arytenoid cartilage, but it is rare to invade the laryngeal ventricular band upward. Supraglottic cancer develops faster and is most likely to spread to the pre-epiglottic space, or invade the piriform sinus along the epiglottic folds, or develop along the pharyngeal epiglottic folds to the epiglottic valley and the root of the tongue on the posterior pharyngeal wall. Subglottic cancer often develops forward and downward, infiltrating the opposite subglottis, but rarely invades backward. Laryngeal embryology studies have shown that supraglottic and subglottic tissues come from different primordia. The supraglottic develops from the buccal pharyngeal primordium, and the glottis and subglottis develop from the tracheobronchial primordium. These two different primordia each have different lymphatic circulation pathways. Therefore, the spread of laryngeal cancer is limited to or primarily limited to the range demarcated by the embryo. According to this understanding, supraglottic cancer rarely develops across the subglottis, and subglottic cancer rarely spreads to the supraglottis.

(II) Lymphatic metastasis Laryngeal cancer can metastasize through the lymphatic system, with the cervical lymph nodes appearing first. The glottic type has few lymphatic vessels in the vocal cords, so metastasis occurs later. The supraglottic type has abundant lymphatic tissue, so lymphatic metastasis occurs earlier. The early or late appearance of lymph node metastasis is related to the primary site of the lesion and clinical stage, as well as the histological characteristics of the tumor. Clinical statistics show that non-invasive carcinoma in situ has almost no lymph node metastasis, while about 30% of patients with invasive cancer have lymph node metastasis. If the scope of the lesion is limited to the glottis, the chance of metastasis is less than 1%. However, if the lesion has invaded the laryngeal ventricle, laryngeal vestibule, and has invaded the subglottic area, or the primary site of the tumor is in the laryngeal vestibule, about 30% may have near lymph node metastasis. Cancers at the edge of the laryngeal vestibule or the pyriform sinus have a higher chance of cervical lymph node metastasis, which can reach about 50%.