Clinicopathological characteristics and cancer-specific survival prediction of Large cell lung cencer: a population-based study

Abstract Background:The features and survival outcome large cell lung cancer(LCLC) are scarce reported due to its low incidence,as a result, the prognoses of LCLC remain unclear.The aim of this study was to describe the demographic and clinical characteristics of large cell lung cancer with a population-base database and find the prognosis factors for cancer-specific survival(CSS) of the LCLC patients.Besides,a nomogram would be developed and independently validated to predict the CSS for LCLC based on the found prognosis factors. Methods: We extracted LCLC patients information from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results(SEER) database(2005-2014) and summarized the characteristic of the extracted factors.We used the Cox proportional hazards regression to find the prognosis factors for LCLC patients and develop the nomogram based on these in a splitted train cohort from the extracted data.The validation of the developed nomogram would be performed in an independent validation cohort from the extracted data, in which the C-index and the average of the time-dependent area under the receiver operating characteristic curve(time-dependent AUC) for CSS in 1-year, 3-year and 5-year would be calculated.The calibration curves would be drawn to visualize the performance of the established nomogram. Results: In result,4936 patients with LCLC were identified from the SEER database. Nearly half of LCLC patients were diagnosis with stage IV,only approximately 20% of patients was performed surgery.The prognosis factors influence the LCLC patients included age, sex,American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) stage,race,surgery, tumour size and marital status.The calculated C-index was 0.701±0.01,mean time-dependent AUC for CSS in 1-year, 3-year and 5-year was 0.88.The calibrate curve showed that the gap between the predicted and observed CSS for 1-year, 3-year and 5-year was small. Conclusions:Sex,age,race,marital status,AJCC stage, surgery and tumour size are all the independent prognostic factors for CSS of the LCLC.The established nomogram can provide more precise evaluation for the survival of LCLC patients,and help the clinicians to make individual management.