Can surgery boost the survival benefit of chemoradiotherapy in T1b1-T2a1 stage cervical cancer with lymph node metastasis? A population-based study.

Objective: This study aimed to determine whether surgery followed by adjuvant chemoradiotherapy has superior survival outcomes for node-positive patients with T1b1-T2a1 stage cervical cancer compared with those who undergo chemoradiation.

Methods: We investigated the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database for 12,701 patients diagnosed between 2000 and 2018. Patients were stratified according to different T stages and different treatment strategies. Surgery included radical hysterectomy (RH) or total hysterectomy (TH). Radiotherapy (RT) included adjuvant chemoradiation or chemoradiation alone. Cox analyses were performed to select the clinically important factors of survival outcomes. Survival analysis was used to compare those who received different treatment methods.

Results: A total of 12,701 International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics 2018 stage IIIC cervical cancer patients were identified. The risk of overall survival (OS) was significantly different between patients who received and did not receive chemoradiotherapy in the T categories. In the propensity-score matched dataset, early-T stage (T1b1 and T1b2) and node-positive patients in the "RH+RT" and "TH+RT" groups had better disease-specific survival (DSS) than those in the RT group. No difference in DSS was observed between the "surgery following RT" group and the RT group in locally advanced stage (T1b3 and T2a1, node positive) patients. Regarding T1b1-T2a1 node-positive patients, the RH+RT group had a similar survival outcome to that in the TH+RT group.

Conclusion: We showed that surgery following RT benefits early-T stage (T1b1 and T1b2) cervical cancer patients with lymph node metastasis. For locally advanced stages (T1b3 and T2a1), surgery and RT had similar survival outcomes.