The ratio of the length from the incisor to the tumor to the height predict recurrent laryngeal nerve lymph node metastasis in patients with thoracic esophageal squamous cell carcinoma.

BACKGROUND The metastasis of laryngeal nerve lymph node is mostly found in the upper-and middle esophageal cancer, the ratio(LH) of esophageal length from the upper incisors to the position where the esophageal tumor began to appear as proven via endoscopy to the height is likely to affect the possibility of detection of recurrent laryngeal nerve(RLN) lymph node (LN) metastasis. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the predictive value of LH for RLN LN metastasis. METHODS One hundred eighty-eight patients (mean age, 64.89; range, 46-84 years) calculated LH before esophagectomy and LN dissection were retrospective analyzed. The clinicopathological data of the patients, LH calculations were compared with the RLN LN histopathologic results to investigate the effect of LH on the diagnosis of RLN LN metastasis. RESULTS The LH correlated with that of the RLN LN metastasis in receiver-operating-characteristic (ROC) analysis. Our ROC analyses demonstrated the optimal cut-off value was 16.66 for LH with an area under the curve value of 0.69. Compared with the Height (H) and L, ROC curve for LH have better performance in predicting the RLN LN metastasis. CONCLUSIONS LH is a useful predictive tool in the evaluation of RLN LN metastasis for esophageal cancer. The present findings support the result that LH can be an indicator of RLN LN dissection.