Background: Squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) is the most common histological type of laryngeal cancer. Several variants of SCC have been reported. However, how these variants differ from conventional SCC and how they should be treated remain to be elucidated.
Objective: To compare the prognosis of early-stage glottic cancer among SCC variants.
Methods: We obtained data from 12471 cases using the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database. Disease-specific survival (DSS) and overall survival (OS) rates were estimated using the Kaplan-Meier method. A Cox proportional hazard model was used to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) according to the variants.
Results: HRs for DSS and OS compared with well-differentiated SCC were 3.83 and 3.48 for adenosquamous, 1.42 and 1.42 for basaloid, 1.14 and 1.17 for papillary, 0.85 and 0.94 for spindle, and 0.81 and 1.00 for verrucous SCC. The difference in DSS among the treatment modalities was significant in conventional and papillary SCC (p < .001 and p = .032, respectively).
Conclusions: The prognosis of SCC variants, except for adenosquamous SCC, is comparable to that of conventional SCC.
Keywords: Squamous cell carcinoma; adenosquamous carcinoma; papillary squamous cell carcinoma; spindle cell carcinoma; verrucous carcinoma.