Prognosis and survival for oral cancer

A prognosis is the doctor’s best estimate of how cancer will affect you and how it will respond to treatment. Survival is the percentage of people with a disease who are alive at some point in time after their diagnosis. Prognosis and survival depend on many factors.

The doctor will look at certain aspects of the cancer as well as characteristics of the person. These are called prognostic factors. The doctor will also look at predictive factors, which influence how a cancer will respond to a certain treatment and how likely it is that the cancer will come back after treatment.

Prognostic and predictive factors are often discussed together. They both play a part in deciding on a prognosis and a treatment plan just for you. Only a doctor familiar with your medical history, the type and stage and other features of the cancer, the treatments chosen and the response to treatment can put all of this information together with survival statistics to arrive at a prognosis and chances of survival.

The following are prognostic and predictive factors for oral cancer.

The lower the stage of oral cancer, the better the prognosis.

Depth of invasion is how deep the tumour has grown into the tissue of the mouth. A tumour with a larger depth of invasion has a poorer prognosis.

The margin is the area of healthy tissue around a tumour that is removed along with the tumour during surgery. If there are cancer cells in the margin, it is called a positive surgical margin. If there are no cancer cells in the margin, it is called a negative margin. Tumours with negative surgical margins have a better prognosis than tumours with a positive surgical margin.

Cancer can spread from the place where it started to nearby areas. Oral cancer that has grown into or around a nerve (called perineural invasion), the blood vessels (called vascular invasion), or the lymph nodes has a poorer prognosis than cancer that has not spread into these nearby areas.