Introduction: To analyze the presence of microscopic tumoral necrosis in primary initial laryngeal tumor and to correlate it with clinical characteristics and histopathology to identify the impact in the evolution. Study design: Clinical retrospective. Material and methods: Retrospective study of the medical files and revision of histology sections of 49 squamous cell carcinoma of the larynx staged T1 and T2, treated in the Service of Head and Neck Surgery at Heliópolis Hospital, São Paulo /SP, between January/1978 and December/1997. Results: There was strong association between the presence of microscopic necrosis and the infiltrative characteristic of the primary lesion (p=0.004), lesions in the supraglottic (p=0.021), clinical staging T2 (p=0.04), occurrence of cervical metastasis (p=0.04) and less differentiated lesions (p=0.025). Those cases that presented microscopic necrosis tended to have the best evolution. Conclusion: The information gathered by our study suggested that necrosis itself, as classified by histopathology techniques, may not have exclusive influence or reflex on volume of growth, reflecting the rate of tumoral growth, but it may be related to other tumor factors and/or to a host, such as programmed cellular death.
necrosis; squamous cell carcinoma; larynx
