CONCLUSION
Biological and psychosocial factors may contribute to the delayed diagnosis of HNCs. The high rate of cancer-related deaths in postmortem diagnosis of non-thyroid HNCs reveals the need for health care professionals to increase vigilance in detecting these cancers in order to prevent misdiagnoses. Our study demonstrates that it is imperative the medical community improves awareness of asymptomatic HNC patients and emphasizes the need to improve screening in those who may be high risk for disease development.