Demography, patterns of care and survival outcomes in patients with malignant tumors of trachea: A systematic review and individual patient data analysis of 733 patients

Abstract Background Malignant tumors of the trachea (MTT) account for 0.01-0.4% of all cancer cases. The rarity of the tumor along with different histologies makes it is a great challenge on how to optimally treat tracheal tumors and most of the available data is from small retrospective data series. We performed a systematic review and individual patient data analysis to evaluate the patterns of care and survival outcomes in patient with MTT. Methodology A comprehensive search in Pub Med and Google scholar was done to find all possible publications related to malignant tumors of the trachea. The data on patient demograpphy, treatment, survival and recurrence pattern of individual patient was collected from the published data and was entered in a predesigned proforma. Progression free survival [PFS] and overall survival [OS] was calculated from the date of diagnosis to the date of documented progression and death respectively. Kaplan- Meier method was used for survival analysis and uni-variate analysis was performed using log rank test. SPSS v16 was used for all statistical analysis. Results 733 patients were included in this analysis. The most common histology was adenoid cystic carcinoma (ACC) followed by squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). The gender ratio was 4.43: 1[male: female] in patients with SCC while it was 0.85:1[male: female] in ACC. Smoking and age >50 years were associated with worse OS. The estimated median overall survival for entire cohort was 96 months. Survival was significantly better in patients with ACC than in patients with SCC [165 vs. 14 months, p  Conclusion ACC and SCC are the most common MTT. ACC has better prognosis compared to SCC. Surgery seems to provide better outcomes than radiation for ACC and sarcoma. Role of definitive radiotherapy versus surgery in SCC needs to be further studied.