A Scoring System to Select the Candidates for Adjuvant Chemotherapy Alone in High-Risk Early-Stage Cervical Cancer Patients With Pelvic Lymph Node Metastases After Surgery

Abstract

Background: The aim was to build a risk scoring system to guide the adjuvant treatment for early-stage cervical cancer patients with pelvic lymph node (LN) metastases after surgery.

Methods: A cohort of 1213 early-stage cervical cancer patients with pelvic LN metastases (T1-2aN1M0) were selected from the NCI SEER database, of which 1040 patients received adjuvant external beam radiotherapy concurrent with chemotherapy (EBRT+Chemo) and 173 patients received adjuvant chemotherapy alone. The Cox regression analysis was applied to identify the risk factors associated with worse survival. The exp (β) of each independent risk factors from multivariate analysis was assigned to develop the risk scoring system. The total cohort was divided into different risk subgroups accordingly and the efficacy of different adjuvant modalities in each risk subgroups was compared.

Results: The patients were divided into 3 risk subgroups (Low-risk: total score <7.20, Middle-risk:7.20≤ total score≤ 8.40, High-risk: total score<8.40) based on the scoring system incorporating 5 independent risk factors. The survival analysis suggested that low-risk (hazard ratio [HR]=1.046, 95% CI: 0.586-1.867; P= 0.879) and middle-risk patients (HR=0.709, 95% CI: 0.459-1.096; P =0.122) could not benefit more from EBRT+Chemo than Chemo alone. However, EBRT+Chemo remained the superiority to Chemo alone in the high-risk subgroup (HR=0.482, 95% CI: 0.294-0.791; P =0.003).

Conclusion: A risk scoring system has been built to direct the adjuvant treatment for early-stage cervical cancer patients with pelvic LN metastases after surgery, where Chemo alone was totally enough for low-risk and middle-risk patients stratified by the model while EBRT+Chemo was still recommended for patients in the high-risk subgroup.