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Thyroid cancer conditional survival affected by age, cancer stage, survivorship phase
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In patients with thyroid cancer, conditional survival appears to be affected by cancer stage, age at diagnosis and duration of survival to date from diagnosis, according to recent findings.
In the study, researchers utilized data on 43,392 patients from the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) registry. All patients were diagnosed with well-differentiated thyroid cancer between 1998 and 2005. Well-differentiated thyroid cancer included papillary thyroid cancer, follicular thyroid cancer and Hurthle cell cancer. The researchers followed the patients for up to 12 years, with a median follow-up of 7.5 years. SEER summary stage was used to classify tumor stage as localized, regional or distant.
The researchers found that conditional survival was excellent among patients with localized disease regardless of duration of survivorship from diagnosis. While patients with regional thyroid cancer had fairly stable 5-year survival, this with distant thyroid cancer had progressively improving conditions survival the longer they lived beyond diagnosis.
A correlation was found between gender and age on conditional survival. Age was also found to influence disease-specific survival for patients with localized (HR=88.7; 95% CI, 26.3-555; comparison of patients ≥80 years vs. <30 years), regional (HR=105; 95% CI, 52.6-250) and distant disease (HR=86.8; 95% CI, 32.5-354). There was significantly worse disease-specific survival among male patients with regional thyroid cancer (HR=1.56; 95% CI, 1.31-1.852); however, male gender did not influence disease-specific survival among patients with localized or distant thyroid cancer.
According to the researchers these findings may be used by physicians to guide treatment plans for patients with thyroid cancer.
“For example, the mortality rate for localized thyroid cancer is extremely low and the conditional cancer clinics after a few years of surveillance. In contrast, patients with distant thyroid cancer had a conditional 5-year disease specific survival curve that suggests that some patients still die because of thyroid cancer many years after initial diagnosis. These patients likely need long-term surveillance in a dedicated thyroid cancer clinic.”
Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.
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