Primary urethral cancer: A GETUG French nationwide cohort study.

Abstract

430 Background: Primary urethral cancer (PUC) is a rare and heterogeneous malignancy. Due to its scarcity, little data are available on the optimal treatment sequence and survival, especially in metastatic patients. Methods: Data from patients diagnosed with a PUC between 01/01/2000 and 12/31/2018 were retrospectively collected from nine French referral centers. Survival rate were estimated with the Kaplan-Meier method and prognostic factors were analyzed using the Cox proportional hazards model and the log-rank test. In order to increase the statistical power of survival analysis in the metastatic stage, patients with synchronous and metachronous metastatic disease were pooled. Results: We identified 44 (62%) males and 27 (38%) females with a PUC. The most frequent histological types were urothelial carcinomas (40.0%), squamous cell carcinomas (34.3%) and adenocarcinomas (14.3%). Twenty-five (35.2%) patients were diagnosed at a localized stage (≤ T2, N0, M0); 35 (49.3%) at a locally advanced stage (≥ T3 or ≥ N1, M0) and 11 (15.5%) at a distant stage (M1). Twenty-seven patients had a metachronous metastatic cancer. Multimodality therapy was used in 24.0% and 57.1% of the patients with a localized and locally advanced disease, respectively. In the entire cohort, median overall survival (OS) was 52.5 months (IC95% 32.2 – 64.1) and stage at diagnosis was a predictor of OS (p < 0.0001). For the 60 patients with a non-metastatic disease, 39 (65%) had a recurrence or were dead and the median disease-free survival (DFS) was 21.2 months (IC95% 16.8 – 34.5). Nodal involvement was the only factor associated with DFS (HR: 2.03, p = 0.0390). Multimodal treatment compared with unimodal treatment was not significantly associated with DFS (HR: 1.22, p = 0.5419). Regarding survival of the 38 metastatic patients, the median OS was 15.2 months (IC95% 8.2 – 23.5) and the median progression-free survival was 6.4 months (IC95% 4.4 – 9.8). Conclusions: This retrospective study showed an important heterogeneity in terms of histology, stage at diagnosis, and treatment of PUC. In this cohort, the multimodal approach did not show any improvement in survival of non-metastatic patients. This study is one of the few to describe the survival in metastatic patients.