Prognostic Factors for Overall Survival in Nasopharyngeal Cancer and Implication for TNM Staging by UICC: A Systematic Review of the Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study aims to identify prognostic factors in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) to improve the current 8th edition TNM classification. A systematic review of the literature reported between 2013 and 2019 in PubMed, Embase, and Scopus was conducted. Studies were included if (1) original clinical studies, (2) ≥50 NPC patients, and (3) analyses on the association between prognostic factors and overall survival. The data elements of eligible studies were abstracted and analyzed. A level of evidence was synthesized for each suggested change to the TNM staging and prognostic factors. Of 5,595 studies screened, 108 studies (44 studies on anatomical criteria and 64 on non-anatomical factors) were selected. Proposed changes/factors with strong evidence included the upstaging paranasal sinus to T4, defining parotid lymph node as N3, upstaging N-category based on presence of lymph node necrosis, as well as the incorporation of non-TNM factors including EBV-DNA level, primary gross tumor volume (GTV), nodal GTV, neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio, lactate dehydrogenase, C-reactive protein/albumin ratio, platelet count, SUVmax of the primary tumor, and total lesion glycolysis. This systematic review provides a useful summary of suggestions and prognostic factors that potentially improve the current staging system. Further validation studies are warranted to confirm their significance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".