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Background The current treatment options for cancer of the base of the tongue and glosso-epiglottic region are surgery, radiotherapy, or a combination of both modalities. Comparisons between different modalities are not common in the literature, and a real standard of treatment has not yet been established. The purpose of our study was to evaluate the results of treatment in a large series of patients from 18 Italian institutions in relation to the main treatment adopted.Methods The present study is a retrospective survey. The series was divided into a combined surgery group and a radiotherapy group. The Kaplan-Meier method and the log-rank test were used for survival calculations and comparisons.Results Eight hundred patients were registered (25.7% stage III and 62% stage IV), 336 in the surgery and 372 in the radiotherapy group. Conventional fractionation was adopted in almost all cases. The five-year overall and disease free survival of the whole series was 32% and 38%, respectively. Survival was slightly better for patients with tumors of the glosso-epiglottic region than for those with a tumor of the base of the tongue. Five-year disease-free survival was 55% for patients treated with surgery +/- radiochemotherapy and 26% for those submitted to radiotherapy alone or in combination with chemotherapy. As far as the total dose and the treatment duration were concerned, only 26% of the patients of the radiotherapy group met the established criteria of adequacy, but in patients with adequate radiation the control rate was better only for small tumors (T1-T2).Conclusions The results in patients treated with surgery +/-postoperative radiotherapy were similar to or better than those reported in the best series in the literature. By contrast, the survival rate of irradiated patients was lower than those reported by other centers.