Evaluation of clinicopathologic factors associated with the state of surgical margins in head and neck carcinomas

Carcinomas are the most common head and neck cancers. Adequate resection of the margins is critical for the management and predicting the prognosis of patients with head and carcinomas. The aim of this study was to determine clinicopathological factors influencing final tumor margins in resected carcinomas.
In this cross-sectional study, the records of all the patients with oral and maxillofacial carcinomas of soft tissue in 2006-2016, who had undergone surgical resection, were analyzed. Data on clinicopathological factors, including sex, age, type of tumor, tumor size and location, lymph node metastasis, the number of margins involved, tumor histological grade, tumor clinical stage, and the results of frozen section were collected and analyzed with descriptive statistics and chi-squared test.
A total of 53.5% of the subjects had positive pathological margins (p value = 0.5), 12.7% had close margins and 0.8% had tumor-free margins. Positive margins exhibited a significant relationship with tumor size (p value = 0.01) and location (p value = 0.03). There were no significant relationships between sex, age, type of tumor, lymph node metastasis, histopathological tumor grade, clinical stage and frozen section with final margin (p value > 0.05).
In the present study, 66.2% of oral carcinomas showed final positive margins and the status of the final margin was associated with the tumor size and location.