Purpose: We conducted a survey to assess the performance of preoperative staging and the application of French surgical guidelines in women with presumed stage I endometrial cancer (EC).
Methods: The survey included 26 questions about the number of patients in low-, intermediate-, and high-risk groups operated on in 2012, the proportion of patients upstaged or downstaged by the examination of the uterus, and the proportion of subsequent surgery for lymph node dissection.
Results: Thirty-two (70 %) of the 46 French university hospitals responded to the questionnaire. Among 886 patients with EC treated, 661 had stage 1 EC. The rates of presumed preoperative type 1 low-, intermediate-, high-risk EC and type 2 EC were 310 (46.9 %), 218 (33 %), 39 (5.9 %), and 94 (14.2 %) respectively. Among 567 type 1 patients, 35 % were upstaged and 6 % were downstaged. Fair agreement was found between preoperative and postoperative risk assessment (κ = 0.37). Patients with presumed low- and intermediate-risk EC upstaged postoperatively to FIGO stage II/III were more likely to have a restaging operation than patients upstaged to type 1 high-risk FIGO stage I EC: 37/70 (52.8 %) versus 26/75 (34.6 %), p = 0.027. The proportions of patients undergoing the recommended subsequent pelvic and/or para-aortic lymph node dissection were low: 34/85 (40 %) and 47/145 (32.4 %) respectively. Lymph node samplings were mainly performed by laparoscopy: 31/34 (91.2 %) and 40/47 (85.1 %) for pelvic and para-aortic dissection respectively.
Conclusions: Our survey showed that the performance of preoperative assessment of FIGO stage I EC was moderate and that adherence to the guidelines was low.