UCI Health head and neck surgeons Tjoson Tjoa, MD and Yarah Haidar, MD met to discuss recent advancements in their field and specifically the use of transoral robotic surgery to identify the primary malignancy for a patient who has an HPV-associated oropharyngeal cancer.
One thing that's really changed in our field over the past 5 to 10 years is that we're, we're now seeing that the most common head and neck cancer by far is HPV, positive oropharyngeal cancer. Um And the nice thing and exciting thing about that is that there is treatments now for it that don't cause the traditional side effects that we associate with head and neck cancer treatment. Um Doctor Hader, I know you've been involved in several studies that have looked at ways that we can treat oral pharyngeal cancer differently. Um Can you talk about some of those? So, um it's very common nationally to do studies on de escalation treatment options for HPV, positive or pharyngeal cancer patients. Here at UC Irvine, we've published several studies on the use of transoral robotic surgery for the identification of an unknown primary um oropharyngeal cancer. And so we found that transoral robotic surgery is, is the most effective way to find the primary for a patient who has an HPV associated or pharyngeal cancer. Um So here we perform a lot of trans or robotic surgery. Um And we use that for any patient who has an unknown primary, um, or phal malignancy.
