Competing-risks model for predicting the prognostic value of lymph nodes in medullary thyroid carcinoma

by Fangjian Shang, Xiaodan Liu, Xin Ren, Yanlin Li, Lei Cai, Yujia Sun, Jian Wen, Xiaodan Zhai

Medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC) is an infrequent form malignant tumor with a poor prognosis. Because of the influence of competitive risk, there may suffer from bias in the analysis of prognostic factors of MTC.

By extracting the data of patients diagnosed with MTC registered in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database from 1998 to 2016, we established the Cox proportional-hazards and competing-risks model to retrospectively analyze the impact of related factors on lymph nodes statistically.

A total of 2,435 patients were included in the analysis, of which 198 died of MTC. The results of the multifactor competing-risk model showed that the number of total lymph nodes (19–89), positive lymph nodes (1–10,11–75) and positive lymph node ratio (25%-53%,>54%), age (46–60,>61), chemotherapy, mode of radiotherapy (others), tumor size(2-4cm,>4cm), number of lesions greater than 1 were poor prognostic factors for MTC. For the number of total lymph nodes, unlike the multivariate Cox proportional-hazards model results, we found that it became an independent risk factor after excluding competitive risk factors. Competitive risk factors have little effect on the number of positive lymph nodes. For the proportion of positive lymph nodes, we found that after excluding competitive risk factors, the Cox proportional-hazards model overestimates its impact on prognosis. The competitive risk model is often more accurate in analyzing the effects of prognostic factors.

After excluding the competitive risk, the number of lymph nodes, the number of positive and the positive proportion are the poor prognostic factors of medullary thyroid cancer, which can help clinicians more accurately evaluate the prognosis of patients with medullary thyroid cancer and provide a reference for treatment decision-making.