Familial Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma 6

Prognostic Factors in Nasopharyngeal Cancer 103with a uniform protocol of 10-weekly neoadjuvantchemotherapy followed by radiation (Lin et al.2003a) with a minimal follow-up time of 5 years.There were 3 local recurrences, 16 distant failures,and 4 combined local and distant failures. Theauthors retrospectively delineated the tumor contourwithout retropharyngeal nodes on pretreatmentT2-weighted axial MRI and calculated theprimary tumor volume in radiation treatment planningsystem. All survival analyses showed no statisticallysignificant difference between patients withlarge or small (cutoff values by either median, ormean) primary tumor volume. The comparisonsbetween patients with primary tumor volume ³ 25and