Laryngeal preneoplastic lesions and cancer: challenging diagnosis

Background: Multi-step cancerogenesis guides laryngeal cancer onset and it includes a wide variety of pre-cancerous lesions that are macroscopically challenging to identify and distinguish from initial cancerous foci. Since the treatment of laryngeal cancer and its precursor lesions has a great impact on important laryngeal basic functions, early detection and preoperative assessment are important for a curative and function-preserving therapy. Nowadays, despite the high number of more advanced diagnostic techniques and methods, unfortunately, it is not uncommon for different clinicians to use different nomenclature or to identify different stage for the same laryngeal lesion. From these observations, it is obvious that an instrument offering the possibility to detect pre-cancerous lesions, early cancerous lesions, and satellite foci or second primaries would be the key to improving management and outcome in laryngeal patients. Object. this meta-analysis of literature aimed to synthesize the validity of each single diagnostic technique in identifying and staging laryngeal disease.