Background: Marital status has been demonstrated as a predictive factor for prognosis in diverse malignancies, but its role in the survival of gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) remains unclear.
Material and methods: This study was aimed to investigate the impact of marital status on the overall survival (OS) and cancer-specific survival (CSS) of operable GIST cases, by using data from Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database. In total, 6582 GIST patients between 1973 and 2013 were identified from SEER database.
Results: Univariate and multivariate analyses demonstrated the marital status as an independent predictive factor for survival. Married group had better 5-year OS and CSS than unmarried group (OS: 79.2% vs 71.3%, P < .001; CSS: 88.9% vs 84.8%, P < .001). And compared to married, divorced/separated, and single group, widowed group had the lowest 5-year OS and CSS (61.3% and 82.2%). Further subgroup analyses validated the relationship between marital status and survival among all SEER stages and different age groups. And additional sensitivity analyses according to other clinicopathological features confirmed that married cases had higher survival rate than unmarried cases.
Conclusion: In conclusion, marriage could be a protective prognostic factor for survival, and widowed patients had a higher risk of death.
Keywords: SEER database; gastrointestinal stromal tumor; marital status; survival.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.