The clinical characteristics and outcomes of carotid body tumors in Chinese patients: A STROBE-compliant observational study

This study aims to investigate the clinical characteristics and outcomes of carotid body tumors in Chinese patients in the last decade. A systematic search was conducted without limits and included studies published between January 2006 and December 2016 according to PubMed, the Chinese Science Citation Database, the China Science Periodical Database and the China National Knowledge Infrastructure. Relevant synonyms for the search terms “paraganglioma” and “carotid body tumor” were applied, and the clinical data were evaluated and analyzed. There were 1810 cases of CBTs reported in the last decade, of which females accounted for 60.22%, and the mean age was 40.60 years, with most cases being sporadic (98.51%). Surgical resection was performed in 1791 cases: vessel repair occurred in 38.88% of the cases, carotid ligation occurred in 1.42% of the cases, and 1.05% of the patients refused treatment. Some patients underwent selective embolization, and the results showed that embolization could decrease procedure time and blood loss (P < .01). Stroke and death occurred in 1.95% and 0.39% of patients, respectively. Malignant CBTs accounted for 4.30% of cases, and the metastatic sites involved were local metastasis (46.88%), lung (31.25%), bone (21.88%), liver (12.50%), and brain (9.38%). The overall survival rate was 98.87% 36 months after the procedure, and the survival rate of metastatic cases was 56.25% 6 months after recurrence; however, only 21.88% of metastatic cases received radiotherapy. The CBTs of Chinese patients showed some clinical features that were different from those of Western patients.