Demographical Investigations of Iraqi Patients with Nasopharyngeal and Sinonasal Neoplasms

Introduction: Age is important risk factor for nasopharyngeal and sinonasal cancers, but data regarding whether patient age at diagnosis is related to such malignancies survival are conflicting. This population-based study tried to evaluate the impact of some demographical characteristics of patients with nasopharyngeal and sinonasal tumors for updating the recent insights of these challenging tumors in our country, on the hope that it may serve in speculation of the related outcomes. This study included 183 formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tissue blocks from 35 inflammatory nasal polyps (INP), 35 sinonasal papillomae (SNP), 65 nasopharyngeal carcinomas (NPC), 18 sinonasal carcinomas (SNC) as well as 30 healthy nasal tissues as a control for this study. Results: It was observed from the data in this research that the age group of those patients mostly affected with NPC is the age stratum of 41-60 years (46.2%:30), while the more influenced age of SNC was 41-60 and 61-80 years (50%:9). Regarding gender distribution of the patients with NPC and SNC lesions, the percentage of the males with NPC was higher (73.8%: 48) than of their female counterparts (26.2%: 17). Whereas, the level of males with sinonasal cancers was lower (38.9%: 7) than the level of their female counterparts (61.1%: 11). Anatomically, NPC cases, 19(29.2%) cases were as nasal masses and 46 (70.8%) were as post nasal masses. On the other hand, SNC was 16 (88.9%) as nasal masses and only 2 (11.1%) were as para nasal masses. In regard to histopathological features of carcinoma tissues, the undifferentiated carcinoma was the most frequent type in nasopharyngeal carcinoma in this study, constituting (75.4%), while the moderately differentiated carcinoma was the most frequent type in sinonasal cancer tissues group founding (44.4%) of the cases. Conclusions: We found age and gender-specific inequalities in time to diagnosis for some, but not all cancer sites studied. While these need further explanation, these findings can inform the development and evaluation of interventions intended to achieve a timely diagnosis and improved cancer outcomes, such as to provide equity across all age and gender groupings.