Preoperative Staging in Oral Cavity Cancer: Nationwide Practice and Concordance With Pathology

Objectives The clarity of TNM‐classification for oral cancer has a direct impact on healthcare resource allocation, treatment decisions, morbidity, and clinical outcomes. However, possible TNM ambiguity between hospitals exists due to the broad range of available diagnostics. Therefore, this study aims to assess current practice variation in preoperative staging for oral cavity cancer. Materials and Methods All patients who underwent primary oral cavity cancer resection in the Netherlands between 2018 and 2021 were selected from the Dutch Head and Neck Audit database. Preoperative staging (cTN) was compared to definitive pathology staging (pTN) as the gold standard for assessing concordance at national and hospital levels. Results Disease stage was upstaged in 27.5% of the patients. For T‐classification analysis, 2458 patients were included. Accuracy for T‐classification categories was 85.2%–93.1%, but significant hospital variation in overstaging and understaging was observed. For N‐classification analysis, 1746 patients were included. Preoperative assessment of node involvement missed metastasis in 25.1% of the cN0 patients, resulting in 77.3% accuracy. Conclusion Significant preoperative understaging of oral cancer calls the attention to the difficulties of the diagnostics of oral cancer. Although the accuracy of preoperative staging in oral cavity cancer is high, significant differences between hospitals were observed.