Abstract
Marital status has been proved to be correlated to the survival of patients in various cancer types, except for that in the large female population of epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC). In this study, we retrospectively extracted 10905 eligible EOC patients from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database in the period from 2004 to 2012. We categorized marital status as married, divorced/separated, widowed, and never married. Chi-square test was used to investigate the association between marital status and other variables. The Kaplan-Meier test was adopted to compare survival curves of different groups. Multivariate Cox regression analyses were conducted to estimate the effect of marital status on overall survival (OS) and epithelial ovarian cancer-specific survival (EOCSS). To explore how marital status affected patients diagnosed at the same stage, we further performed subgroup analyses according to TNM stage. The results showed that marital status was an independent predictor for OS and EOCSS. Subgroup analyses indicated that the relationship between marital status and prognosis varied according to different conditions. Widowed patients had poorer prognosis than the other groups in most conditions, while the never married group showed similar risk of mortality as the married ones.
Highlights
Epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) is a clinically and biologically heterogeneous class of tumors including several major subtypes: serous, mucinous, endometrioid, and clear cell [1]
The results showed that marital status was an independent predictor for overall survival (OS) and epithelial ovarian cancer-specific survival (EOCSS)
A total of 10905 eligible epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) patients were identified during the study period in the SEER database
Summary
Epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) is a clinically and biologically heterogeneous class of tumors including several major subtypes: serous, mucinous, endometrioid, and clear cell [1]. Advances in diagnosis and treatment have been achieved in recent decades, agestandardized 5-year survival rate from ovarian cancer for all histological groups combined was around 30–40% in most countries from 1995 to 2009 [2]. It has become the fifth leading cause of cancer death in women in the U.S In 2017, it is estimated that 22,440 new cases of ovarian cancer will be diagnosed and 14,080 deaths due to ovarian cancer will occur [3]. Identifying the relationship between the marital status and the survival of EOC would help researchers, doctors, as well as policy makers better cope with the increasing trend of mortality rate
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