COMPARISON OF FEATURES AND OUTCOMES OF VERMILION LIP SCC WITH ORAL AND HEAD AND NECK CUTANEOUS SCC

Abstract

<h3>Objectives</h3> Comparing features and outcomes of patients with skin, lip, and oral squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) and evaluating restaging lip cancer as skin cancer. <h3>Study Design</h3> All patients surgically treated at our center for vermilion lip SCC, oral SCC, and cutaneous head and neck (HN) SCC between January 2011 and December 2019 were retrospectively reviewed. <h3>Results</h3> 79, 125, and 620 cases were respectively included. Lip and oral SCC were similar regarding tumor diameter (<i>P</i> < .001), depth of invasion (<i>P</i> < .001), surgical margins (<i>P</i> = .01), T stage (<i>P</i> < .001), N stage (<i>P</i> < .001), AJCC stage (<i>P</i> < .001), perineural invasion (<i>P</i> < .001), and vascular invasion (<i>P</i> < .001). In total, 31 lip SCC cases were restaged applying cutaneous HN SCC staging system criteria, with a shift from stages I/II and T1/2 to stages III and T3, respectively. In Kaplan-Meier curves, there was a good distinction among staging curves for oral SCC and cutaneous SCC but not for lip SCC, in both staging models. <h3>Conclusions</h3> There are more similarities between lip SCC and cutaneous HN SCC than oral SCC, although both staging systems failed to distinguish categories in Kaplan-Meier curves.