Sex and Age-Based Differences in Adult Acute Myeloid Leukemia Hospitalizations in the United States, 2009-2018

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) represents the fifth-worst five-year overall survival by cancer type in the United States, and the prognosis is shown to vary by age and sex. However, published data exploring temporal trends in the rates of hospitalization by sex and prognosis patterns incorporating both age and sex remains limited. Therefore, we investigated trends of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) hospitalization rates by sex and the differences in the AML hospitalization rates by sex and age in the adult population using the Nationwide Inpatient Sample database for the years 2009-2018. We examined the differences in rates of AML hospitalizations by sex and age. Next, we stratified the study duration into two groups of five years each: 2009-2013 and 2014-2018 and examined the differences in age and sex across the study period and groups. Pearson’s chi-squared tests were conducted to determine the statistically significant differences in these bivariate comparisons. Overall, during the entire study period, we observed an increased rate of hospitalizations in males, when compared with their female counterparts. The highest AML hospitalization rate for both males and females was observed in the age group of 60-79 years; males accounted for 33.8 per 10,000 hospitalizations and females accounted for 23.3 per 10,000 hospitalizations. The greatest difference in hospitalization rates by age group and sex was observed in 18-39 years (males: 23.6 per 10,000 hospitalizations, females: 7.7 per 10,000 hospitalizations [p-value=<0.01]). The trend in the prevalence of AML hospitalizations by age or sex remains unchanged irrespective of the 5-year study period group. The results from this study would prove vital in directing the decision-making process for healthcare providers and AML patients alike as they work in tandem to navigate the complexities of AML and everything it entails.   Copyright © 2022 Dongarwar et al. Published by Global Health and Education Projects, Inc. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0.