What are the treatments for nasopharyngeal carcinoma and which one is the best?

What are the treatments for nasopharyngeal carcinoma? Which one is the best?

The main treatments for nasopharyngeal carcinoma are as follows:

The best treatment for most cancers is surgery, but nasopharyngeal cancer is different from other cancers. After suffering from nasopharyngeal cancer, doctors generally use radiotherapy to treat it. Radiotherapy is also considered to be the first choice treatment option for nasopharyngeal cancer.

1. The best treatment for nasopharyngeal carcinoma is radiotherapy. This is because pathological examination shows that most nasopharyngeal carcinomas are poorly differentiated squamous cell carcinomas, which are highly malignant and easily invade the surrounding tissues of the nasopharynx and metastasize to the cervical lymph nodes. It is not easy to remove them completely by surgery. The nasopharynx is located in the center of the head, which is relatively hidden and adjacent to important organs, tissues, cranial nerves, blood vessels, etc. The surgical exposure is extremely limited, and the surgery is very likely to damage the surrounding tissues. The risk of surgery is high, and it is even more impossible to perform continuous large-scale resection of the nasopharyngeal tumor and the cervical lymph drainage area. Therefore, the effect of surgical treatment alone for nasopharyngeal carcinoma is not good. Three-dimensional conformal or intensity-modulated radiotherapy is also a good choice.

2. In fact, there are many ways to help inhibit cancer metastasis, and anti-cancer drug chemotherapy, biological therapy and traditional Chinese medicine treatment are still used as auxiliary therapies; since 95% of nasopharyngeal carcinomas are poorly differentiated squamous cell carcinomas, they are highly sensitive to radiation, and radiotherapy is likely to include the primary lesions of nasopharyngeal carcinoma and the cervical lymph node drainage area in the irradiation field, radiotherapy has a good effect, and its short-term effect can reach more than 90%. The overall five-year survival rate after radiotherapy can reach more than 50%; among them, the rates for patients in stages I and II are 95% and 78% respectively. The summary of the treatment of recurrent nasopharyngeal carcinoma also shows that re-radiotherapy still has certain therapeutic value.