Cancer-Specific Mortality in Endometrial Cancer
Purpose. Inaccurate lymph node staging affects treatment planning and may worse prognosis. Non-randomized retrospective study was performed to establish this hypothesis. Materials and methods. The data about patients with diagnosed endometrial cancer of the stages IIII in 20082009 was collected from cancer register of Kyiv Clinical Oncological Centre. Hypothesis: absence of lymphadenectomy in patients with early stage endometrial cancer and undiagnosed lymph node metastases may lead to understaging and the following non-adequate treatment with worse prognosis and outcome. The primary outcome was cancer-specific survival. Results. From 564 patients assessed for eligibility, 61 patients were excluded. Cancer-related death was reported in 76 cases: 39 patients with stage I, 14 patients stage II, 23 patients stage III. The median of cancer-specific survival for the stage I was 27 months, stage II 14 months, stage III 19 months (P0.01) 3-year cancer-specific survival rate was 33,3 for the stage I, 0 stage II, 17.4 stage III. Intergroup analysis showed that there is a statistically significant difference between survival of patients with stage I and stage II (P0.005), but there are no statistically significant difference between survival of patients with stage III and stage I or II (P0.072 and P0.151, respectively). Conclusion. The trend towards the same rates of cancer-specific survival may indicate that the presented cases of early stage endometrial cancer were understaged and consequently undertreated. Further studies with enrolment of more patients are needed.