The present study aimed to analyze the clinical characteristics and prognosis-related factors of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients with bone metastases at the time of diagnosis. A total of 46 NSCLC patients with skeletal metastases at the time of diagnosis from Anhui Provincial Hospital and Anhui Provincial Cancer Hospital Affiliated to Anhui Medical University (Hefei, China) between February 2010 and February 2012 were investigated retrospectively. The median age was 58 years, with a range of 40-80 years, the ratio of males and females was 2:1, and adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma accounted for 71.7 and 28.3% of cases, respectively. Furthermore, 84.8% of patients exhibited multiple skeletal metastases at more than two sites and 54.3% of patients experienced skeletal-related events at the time of diagnosis. The median overall survival (OS) time of the patients was 237 days, and Kaplan-Meier analysis demonstrated that patients with adenocarcinoma (P=0.002), single bone metastases (P=0.023), an Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status of 0-1 (P<0.001) or positive expression of estrogen receptor (ER)-β (P=0.039) exhibited significantly longer survival times. Furthermore, multivariate analysis identified the following independent predictors of OS: Tumor subtype (P=0.022), the number of bone metastases (P=0.016) and an ER-β-positive tumor (P=0.035). In the cohort of NSCLC patients with bone metastases at the time of diagnosis, adenocarcinoma and multiple skeletal metastases were most common.
Keywords: bone metastases; clinical characteristics; estrogen receptor-β; non-small cell lung cancer; prognostic factors.