Marital status is an independent prognostic factor in inflammatory breast cancer patients: an analysis of the surveillance, epidemiology, and end results database

• Published in: Breast cancer research and treatment Vol. 178; no. 2; pp. 379 - 388
• Main Authors: Liu, Yan-ling, Wang, Dun-wei, Yang, Zhu-chun, Ma, Rui, Li, Zhong, Suo, Wei, Zhao, Zhuang, Li, Zhi-wen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.11.2019; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adult; Aged; Aged, 80 and over; Analysis; Animals; Breast cancer; Cancer research; Chemotherapy; Clinical Trial; Databases, Factual; Development and progression; Disease Models, Animal; Disease Susceptibility; Epidemiology; Female; Humans; Inflammation; Inflammatory Breast Neoplasms - diagnosis; Inflammatory Breast Neoplasms - epidemiology; Inflammatory Breast Neoplasms - mortality; Inflammatory Breast Neoplasms - therapy; Kaplan-Meier Estimate; Marital Status; Medicine; Medicine & Public Health; Middle Aged; Multivariate analysis; Neoplasm Grading; Neoplasm Staging; Oncology; Population Surveillance; Prognosis; Proportional Hazards Models; Radiation therapy; Risk Assessment; Risk Factors; SEER Program; Surgery; Surveillance; Survival; Survival analysis; Young Adult; Inflammatory breast cancer; SEER; Marital status; Survival
• ISSN: 0167-6806; 1573-7217
• DOI: 10.1007/s10549-019-05385-8

Objectives The aim of this analysis was to study the impact of marital status on inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) patients, as the prognostic impact is yet to be studied in detail. Methods Data of IBC patients from 2004 to 2010 were sorted out from the database of surveillance, epidemiology, and end results (SEER), and overall survival (OS) rates and breast cancer-specific survival (CSS) rates were compared between a group of married and unmarried patients. The comparison was performed by Kaplan–Meier method with log-rank test, and multivariate survival analysis of CSS and OS was performed using the Cox proportional hazard model. Results Data of 1342 patients were collected from the SEER database, on an average 52% of married patients ( n  = 698, 52.01%) and 48% of unmarried patients ( n  = 644, 47.99%) for this analysis. Married patients were more likely to be more younger (aged ≤ 56) (52.44% vs. 43.94%), white ethnicity (83.24% vs. 71.58%), HoR positive (48.28% vs. 41.61%), more patients received surgery (78.51% vs. 64.60%), chemotherapy (90.69% vs. 80.12%) and radiotherapy (53.44% vs. 44.41%) compared to unmarried group, and less likely to be AJCC stage IV (26.22% vs. 35.40%) (All P ˂ 0.05). Married patients had better 5-year CSS (74.90% vs. 65.55%, P  < 0.0001) and OS rates (45.43% vs. 33.11%, P  < 0.0001). The multivariate analysis revealed that marital status is an independent prognostic factor, whereas the data of unmarried patients showed worse CSS (HR 1.188; 95% CI 1.033–1.367; P  = 0.016) and OS rates (HR 1.245; 95% CI 1.090–1.421; P  = 0.001).The subgroup analysis further revealed that the OS and CSS rates in the married group were better than the unmarried group, regardless of different AJCC stages. Conclusion Marital status was an independent prognostic indicator in IBC patients. As the study reveals, the CSS and OS rates of the married patients were better than those of the unmarried patients.