Association between time from diagnosis to treatment and survival of patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma: A population-based cohort study

Abstract

Background

Treatment delays have frequently been observed in cancer patients. Whether the treatment delays would impair the survival of patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is still unclear.

Methods

The data were derived from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database between 2010 and 2015. Patients were divided into groups of timely treatment (<1 month), intermediate delay (1 and 2 months), and long delay (3–6 months). The influence of different treatment delay intervals on long-term survival was evaluated by multivariate Cox regression analysis.

Results

In total, 2,048 patients with NPC were included in our study. There were 551 patients in the early stage (I, II stage: 26.9 %) and 1,497 patients in the advanced stage (III, IV stage: 73.1 %). No significant difference in overall survival (OS) or cancer-specific survival (CSS) was observed among the groups with various treatment delay intervals (p = 0.48 in OS and p = 0.43 in CSS, respectively). However, upon adjusting for covariates, a significantly improved OS probability emerged in patients with intermediate treatment delays compared to those who received timely interventions in both the entire study population (_adjustedHazard Ratio (_aHR)=0.86, 95 % CI: 0.74–0.99, p = 0.043) and the subgroup with advanced stage (_aHR=0.85, 95 % CI: 0.72–1.00, p = 0.049). Regarding the CSS probability, similar associations were also observed in the entire study population (_aHR=0.84, 95 % CI: 0.71–0.98, p = 0.030) as well as the advanced-stage patients (_aHR=0.83, 95 % CI: 0.70–0.99, p =  0.038).

Conclusions

Our results revealed that treatment delays are not associated with worse survival of NPC patients. Tumor-specific characteristics and subsequent treatment modalities play more pivotal roles in the prognosis of NPC.