Title: Impact of marital status on renal cancer patient survival
Abstract: // Hongzhi Wang 1, * , Lu Wang 1, * , Ildar Kabirov 1, * , Li Peng 1 , Guang Chen 1 , Yinhui Yang 1 , Zamyatnin Andrey A 2, 3 and Wanhai Xu 1 1 Department of Urology, The 4th Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, Harbin, 150001, China 2 Institute of Molecular Medicine, Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University, Moscow 119991, Russia 3 Belozersky Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow 119992, Russia * These authors have contributed equally to this work Correspondence to: Wanhai Xu, email: [email protected] Keywords: renal cancer, marital status, Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results, survival analysis, patient demographics Received: March 17, 2017 Accepted: June 12, 2017 Published: July 26, 2017 ABSTRACT Marital status is an independent prognostic factor for various cancer types. The present study used the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to analyze the impact of marital status on renal cancer patient survival outcomes. We identified a total of 62,405 eligible patients (23,800 women and 38,605 men). Overall 5-year renal cancer cause-specific survival (CSS) was 80.3% in the married group, 69.2% in the widowed group, 78.9% in the single group, and 76.5% in the divorced/separated group. The widowed patient group had the highest female/male ratio, more distant metastases, and fewer high-grade (III/IV) tumors. Most widowed patients (90.4%) were elderly (>60 years old). In our study, male renal cancer patients benefited more from marriage than females. We also found that white married patients had better survival outcomes than other white patient groups, but black unmarried and married patients exhibited similar survival outcomes. Our results show that, in general, unmarried patients have higher rates of cancer-specific mortality and highlight the importance of psychological intervention for cancer patients during treatment.