Only 25–30% of patients actually harbour occult disease in the neck. Currently most centres undertake routine elective neck dissection for T1/T2 oral and oro-pharyngeal carcinomas to simultaneously stage the neck and remove occult disease. The management of the clinically and radiologically negative (N0) neck in patients with small (early) head and neck squamous cell carcinoma remains controversial. At the first consensus meeting of the SENT pathology group there were excellent levels of agreement on the diagnosis of positive and negative nodes, and a number of potential pitfalls such as non-malignant inclusions and staining artefacts were identified. The SENT trial has recruited over 300 cases from 10 European centres and a quality control study of the pathological material is in progress. Adoption of the UICC/TNM definitions is recommended for future sentinel node studies, but further refinements and descriptions are required. However the use of step serial sectioning at 150 micron intervals with pan-cytokeratin immunohistochemistry is currently advised and appears to upstage nodes by approximately 20% over the initial single routine stained section. Current histopathological protocols have been developed for use in the research setting and are designed to identify all micrometastatic disease. Reported detection rates for sentinel neck nodes are greater than 95% and there is also a negative predictive value of 95% for negative sentinel nodes. The main clinical aim of sentinel node biopsy is to achieve better staging and there is now evidence that the procedure reduces morbidity. Sentinel node biopsy is an alternative to elective neck dissection for the management of T1/T2 oral and oro-pharyngeal squamous cell carcinomas and is also finding application to head and neck cancer at other sites.
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