TY - JOUR
T1 - Surgical Delay Is Associated with Improved Survival in Hepatocellular Carcinoma
T2 - Results of the National Cancer Database
AU - Xu, Kerui
AU - Watanabe-Galloway, Shinobu
AU - Rochling, Fedja A.
AU - Farazi, Paraskevi A.
AU - Islam, Km
AU - Wang, Hongmei
AU - Luo, Jiangtao
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, The Society for Surgery of the Alimentary Tract.
PY - 2019/5/15
Y1 - 2019/5/15
N2 - Background: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the fastest growing causes of cancer-related death in the USA. Studies that investigated the impact of HCC therapeutic delays are limited to single centers, and no large-scale database research has been conducted. This study investigated the association of surgical delay and survival in HCC patients. Methods: Patients underwent local tumor destruction and hepatic resection for stages I–III HCC were identified from the 2004 to 2013 Commission on Cancer’s National Cancer Database. Surgical delay was defined as > 60 days from the date of diagnosis to surgery. Generalized linear-mixed model assessed the demographic and clinical factors associated with delay, and frailty Cox proportional hazard analysis examined the prognostic factors for overall survival. Results: A total of 12,102 HCC patients met the eligibility criteria. Median wait time to surgery was 50 days (interquartile range, 29–86), and 4987 patients (41.2%) had surgical delay. Delayed patients demonstrated better 5-year survival for local tumor destruction (29.1 vs. 27.6%; P =.001) and resection (44.1 vs. 41.0%; P =.007). Risk-adjusted model indicated that delayed patients had a 7% decreased risk of death (HR, 0.93; 95% CI, 0.87–0.99; P =.027). Similar findings were also observed using other wait time cutoffs at 50, 70, 80, 90, and 100 days. Conclusions: A plausible explanation of this finding may be case prioritization, in which patients with more severe and advanced disease who were at higher risk of death received earlier surgery, while patients with less-aggressive tumors were operated on later and received more comprehensive preoperative evaluation.
AB - Background: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the fastest growing causes of cancer-related death in the USA. Studies that investigated the impact of HCC therapeutic delays are limited to single centers, and no large-scale database research has been conducted. This study investigated the association of surgical delay and survival in HCC patients. Methods: Patients underwent local tumor destruction and hepatic resection for stages I–III HCC were identified from the 2004 to 2013 Commission on Cancer’s National Cancer Database. Surgical delay was defined as > 60 days from the date of diagnosis to surgery. Generalized linear-mixed model assessed the demographic and clinical factors associated with delay, and frailty Cox proportional hazard analysis examined the prognostic factors for overall survival. Results: A total of 12,102 HCC patients met the eligibility criteria. Median wait time to surgery was 50 days (interquartile range, 29–86), and 4987 patients (41.2%) had surgical delay. Delayed patients demonstrated better 5-year survival for local tumor destruction (29.1 vs. 27.6%; P =.001) and resection (44.1 vs. 41.0%; P =.007). Risk-adjusted model indicated that delayed patients had a 7% decreased risk of death (HR, 0.93; 95% CI, 0.87–0.99; P =.027). Similar findings were also observed using other wait time cutoffs at 50, 70, 80, 90, and 100 days. Conclusions: A plausible explanation of this finding may be case prioritization, in which patients with more severe and advanced disease who were at higher risk of death received earlier surgery, while patients with less-aggressive tumors were operated on later and received more comprehensive preoperative evaluation.
KW - Cancer survival
KW - Hepatocellular carcinoma
KW - National Cancer Database
KW - Surgical delay
KW - Wait time
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U2 - 10.1007/s11605-018-3925-4
DO - 10.1007/s11605-018-3925-4
M3 - Article
C2 - 30328070
AN - SCOPUS:85055534980
SN - 1091-255X
VL - 23
SP - 933
EP - 943
JO - Journal of Gastrointestinal Surgery
JF - Journal of Gastrointestinal Surgery
IS - 5
ER -