151751-Najiba-Chargi

80 CHAPTER 5 U test were used where appropriate. Percentiles were used to describe the distribution of SMA and CSMI. Chi-square test was used to investigate the association between gender and various clinical and demographic variables. Spearman correlation was used for correlation analysis of SMI and patients’ characteristics such as BMI, age and gender. All statistical analyses were performed using the IBM SPSS Statistics version 25.0 software package (Chicago, Illinois, USA). A p-value of <0.05 was considered statistically significant. RESULTS PATIENTS’ CHARACTERISTICS In total, the skeletal muscle mass data of 1763 study subjects were entered in this study da- tabase. After deduplication, 1415 unique patients were included for analysis in this study. Roughly two-third of patients was male, and one-third was female. Continuous variables were not normally distributed (Kolmogorov-Smirnov p < 0.05). The median age of the included pa - tients was 63.7 years at diagnosis, ranging between 19.6 and 97.6 years. The median BMI was 24.0 (range 13.3 - 48.2; only a minority of patients were underweight at diagnosis with a BMI ≤18.5: n=129, 9.1%. This study included tumors of all tumor head and neck sites and all tumor stages. The most common diagnosis was oropharyngeal carcinoma (n=500, 35.3%), and most patients were diagnosed with a stage IV tumor (n=800, 59.4%). Significant differences between male and female patients were seen in age, height and TNM-stage; female patients were older, shorter of height and were less frequently diagnosed with a TNM-stage IV tumor compared to male patients, all p<0.01. Full patient and disease characteristics are shown in table 1. Table 1. Patient’s characteristics of the total study population (n=1415) All subjects (n = 1415) Men (n = 988) Women (n = 427) P-value Age (years) 63.6 [57.0 - 69.8] 63.2 [56.6 - 69.6] 64.9 [58.0 - 70.0] <0.01 Height (cm) 174 [168 - 180] 177 [172 - 182] 167 [162 - 172] <0.01 Weight (kg) 73.9 [62.2 - 84.0] 77.2 [66.0 - 87.0] 66.5 [55.6 - 75.1] <0.01 Body mass index (BMI) 24.0 [21.2 - 27.2] 24.5 [21.6 - 27.2] 23.9 [20.3 - 27.0] <0.01 BMI categorical Below 25 25 or above 838 (59.2) 577 (40.8) 567 (57.4) 421 (42.6) 271 (63.5) 156 (36.5) <0.01