Lymph Node Yield Thresholds for Oral Cancer Survival After Neoadjuvant Therapy

256-patient training cohort from Henan Cancer Hospital (2019-2022) establishes surgical benchmarks for neck dissection in oral squamous cell carcinoma. The study defines a threshold of 20 total nodes for unilateral dissection and 18 nodes per side for bilateral dissection, validated in an independent 199-patient cohort. Achieving these thresholds was independently associated with improved 3-year overall survival and disease-free survival.

Use Cases

• Define surgical quality benchmarks based on lymph node yield thresholds mentioned in the study.
• Predict patient survival outcomes based on the adequacy of lymph node dissection.
• Validate surgical performance metrics in an external patient cohort.
• Assess the association between lymph node yield and post-operative complication risk.

Strengths

• Defined and validated specific numerical thresholds (20 nodes for unilateral, 18 per side for bilateral dissections).
• Uses a multi-cohort design with a 256-patient training set and a 199-patient external validation set.
• Reports concrete statistical associations, including hazard ratios for survival and odds ratios for complications.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to the two hospitals in Henan, China.

Provenance

Source

Shuai Yuan via figshare.

Collection Method

Clinical study of patients treated with neoadjuvant immunochemotherapy and surgery.

Time Range

Training cohort: 2019-2022; Validation cohort: 2020-2022.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-03 05:43:03; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Patients from Henan Cancer Hospital and the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, China.