Marital status independently predicts gastric cancer survival after surgical resection--an analysis of the SEER database

// Rong-liang Shi 1,2,3,* , Qian Chen 1,* , Zhen Yang 1 , Gaofeng Pan 1 , Ziping Zhang 1 , WeiHua Wang 1,4 , Shaoqun Liu 1 , Dongbin Zhang 1 , Daowen Jiang 1,4 and Weiyan Liu 1 1 Department of General Surgery, Minhang Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China 2 Department of Head and Neck Surgery, Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China 3 Department of Oncology, Shanghai Medical College, Fudan University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China 4 Department of Thoracic Surgery, Minhang Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China * These authors have contributed equally to this work Correspondence to: Weiyan Liu, email: // Daowen Jiang, email: // Keywords : gastric cancer, marital status, SEER,survival analysis Received : October 20, 2015 Accepted : January 24, 2016 Published : January 31, 2016 Abstract Marital status was found to be an independent prognostic factor for survival in various cancer types, but it hasn’t been studied in gastric cancer. The Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results database was used to compare survival outcomes with marital status. A total of 16,106 eligible patients were identified. Patients in the widowed group had the highest proportion of women, more common site of stomach, more prevalence of elderly patients, higher percentage of adenocarcinoma, and more tumors at localized stage (P < 0.05). Patients in married group had better 5year cause-specific survival (CSS) than those unmarried (P < 0.05). Further analysis showed that widowed patients always presented the lowest CSS compared with that of other groups. Widowed patients had 7.1% reduction in 5-year CSS compared with married patients at Localized stage (77.2% vs 70.1%, P < 0.001), 9.6% reduction at Regional stage (38.2% vs 28.6%, P < 0.001), and 4.7% reduction at Distant stage (13.3% vs 8.6%, P < 0.001). These results showed that unmarried patients were at greater risk of cancer specific mortality. Despite favorable clinicpathological characteristics, widowed patients were at highest risk of death compared with other groups.