Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2009
Head and neck cancer
General
Squamous carcinomas of the head and neck (a grouping which includes tongue and mouth, nasopharynx and larynx) are associated with cigarette smoking and alcohol ingestion (although the risk factors for different sites may differ). In addition, specific head and neck cancers may be associated with familial cancer syndromes such as hereditary non-polyposis colon cancer syndrome and Li–Fraumeni syndrome (larynx) and Fanconi anaemia (oral cancer). Foulkes et al. (1996) reported a relative risk of 3.7 for developing head and neck cancer in first-degree relatives of an affected case, but the relative risk was almost 8 if the index case had multiple primaries. Spitz et al. (1994) reported an association between mutagen susceptibility (bleomycin-induced chromosome breakage) and multiple primary head and neck cancers, and while new data from the Spitz group (Wu et al., 2002) and others (Cloos et al., 2000) have confirmed or extended these findings, some researchers have questioned the significance of these observations (Szekely et al., 2003), and the bleomycin sensitivity assay is not used clinically. Interestingly, IGF-1 levels also predict the risk of second primary head and neck cancers, and such an assay could be clinically useful (Wu et al., 2004).
Specific sites
Nasopharynx
Cancers of the nasopharynx account for 0.1 per cent of all cancers, and differ from tumours in other parts of the pharynx by not being associated with tobacco or alcohol.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.