Background: Incisional biopsy is indicated for intraoral tumors, but it is a contraindicated surgical procedure for major salivary glands. To avoid complications and facilitate diagnosis, fine needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) is a type of biopsy widely used for preoperative diagnosis in these glands.
Material and methods: The aim of this study was to analyze the agreement between the diagnosis by FNAB (major glands), incisional biopsy (minor glands) and histopathological analysis of the surgical specimen in salivary gland tumors from a database (medical records) of patients treated in a cancer treatment reference center in the Northeast region of Brazil.
Results: The sample consisted of 110 cases, being 86 of them malignant tumors in major salivary glands (parotid gland=73; submandibular gland=13) and 24 cases in minor salivary glands (palate). The female gender was the most affected (57.3%), especially in patients over 60 years (42.7%). In the TNM classification, 41.8% of the cases were in T2 at the time of diagnosis, with most of the regional lymph nodes in N0 (85.5%) and 87.3% of the cases in M0. FNAB was able to identify malignant neoplasms in 68.6% of the cases (n=59), while incisional biopsy in palatal tumors obtained agreement of 75% of the cases (n=18). The analysis revealed that tumors classified as T3-T4 (p=0.012) showed greater agreement between pre- and post-surgical diagnosis.
Conclusions: The results obtained in this study indicate that FNAB has similar accuracy to incisional biopsy in providing satisfactory preoperative diagnoses of malignant tumors in salivary glands.