Effect of obesity on time to progression in patients with resectable and potentially resectable pancreatic cancer.

Abstract

e16246 Background: Obesity has been identified as a risk factor for pancreatic cancer. The prevalence of obesity has been on a rise in the last two decades. Obesity is defined by the world health organization (WHO) as body mass index (BMI) > 30.0 kg/m2. Studies have shown obese patients to have worse survival than non-obese patients with pancreatic cancer. However, there is limited data on effect of obesity on disease progression. We sought to identify the relationship between obesity and time to progression in patients with resectable and potentially resectable pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). Methods: We performed a retrospective review of charts of all patients diagnosed with PDAC from 2017-2019 at Allegheny Health Network. Demographics (including age, sex, and race), treatment details, and time to progression date of diagnosis (rounded off in months) were obtained. Two-sided Mann-Whitney U test and Fischer’s exact test were used to evaluate differences between groups with continuous and categorical variables respectively. Furthermore, paired t test was used to compare mean time to progression between the patients in the obese and non-obese groups. A p-value of < 0.05 was considered as level of significance. Results: Out of the 121 patients who received treatment at our institution, 40 patients who had resectable or potentially resectable disease and had progression of disease were included in the analysis. The median age of patients was 68. The majority were females (60%), Caucasians (90%), had Stage I (65%) and potentially resectable disease (55%). Around 70% of patients were treated surgically, 80% received chemotherapy and 26% received radiation therapy. Twelve out of 42 patients were obese (27.5%). No difference in patient characteristics including demographics, staging, and treatment characteristics (proportion of patients who received surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy) was identified between obese and non-obese group patients. The mean time to progression was 11.9 months in obese group as compared to 13.7 months in non-obese group (p = 0.63). Conclusions: Our study showed no significant difference in time to progression of disease between obese and non-obese patients with resectable/potentially resectable pancreatic cancer. Our study is limited by its small sample size, retrospective nature, and unidentifiable confounding factors that could potentially affect outcomes. Larger scale studies are needed to investigate the effect of obesity as a prognostic factor for disease progression in patients with pancreatic cancer.