An analysis of the efficacy of serial screening for familial nasopharyngeal carcinoma based on Markov chain models

Treatment of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) can be improved by early detection of the disease as treatment outcome worsens with disease’s progression. This can be achieved with a mass screening program using Epstein Barr virus (EBV) serology and nasopharyngoscopy. The efficacy of any screening strategy should be evaluated before putting it into practice. Such evaluation is ideally performed with simulation as time and cost often preclude the evaluation by randomized trial. This study simulated and compared the outcomes of 4 screening strategies over a period of 12 years: (A) Annual screening, (B) biennial screening, (C) triennial screening, and (D) triennial screening for participants tested EBV negative and annual screening once the participants are tested EBV positive. Progression of the disease was divided into 4 phases and calculated by applying Markov chain model. Parameters of the transition matrix and probabilities were estimated using data from previous screening results of 1,072 family members of NPC patients. The early detection rates with strategies A, B, C and D are 88, 79, 71 and 87% respectively. The 5-year overall survival with screening is 10–12% higher than that without and is the highest with strategies A and D. Strategy D, however, requires only 64% screening tests compared with strategy A and has almost identical resultant disease stage distribution to strategy A. We concluded that strategy D offered the highest efficacy for NPC screening of family members of NPC patients among the four strategies studied.