Comparative efficacy of six therapies for Hypopharyngeal and laryngeal neoplasms: a network meta-analysis

Background: Hypopharyngeal and laryngeal neoplasms are both fatal and hard to catch in early stages. Yet which treatment is the most efficacious one still remain unanswered. This network meta-analysis (NMA) was conducted to investigdte effectiveness of six therapies being utilized in clinical practice nowadays. Methods: PubMed and Embase were retrieved to synthesize data. Direct and indirect evidence was combined to compare efficacy of treatments. A relative ranking of the six regimens was calculated by the surface under the curve ranking area (SUCRA). Results: A total of 28 trials with 9109 patients were included in our NMA. Five endpoints investigated included 3/5-year overall survival (3/5-OS), 3/5-year disease free survival (3/5-DFS) and 5-year overall survival rate (5-OSR). In terms of all efficacy outcomes, radiotherapy combined with surgery (RT+ S) proved to be better than other therapies while radiotherapy (RT) alone also performed well. Induction chemoradiotherapy (ICRT) was the best regarding 3-DFS (SUCRA = 0.846) while current chemoradiotherapy (CCRT) ranked first in 5-DFS (SUCRA = 0.933) according to SUCRA results. No significant differences were demonstrated in 5-DFS and 5-OSR as shown in the results of NMA. Conclusions: RT combined with surgery turned out to be optimal therapy of all the outcomes while the efficacy of RT was relatively poorer in the treatment of patients with larynx stage III-IV and hypopharynx stage II-IV. Also, the good performance of CCRT and ICRT in terms of DFS made them as secondary recommended therapies. There is no significant difference between surgery and transoral laser microsurgery (TLM) alone.