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Positive relationship between number of negative lymph nodes and duration of gallbladder cancer cause-specific survival after surgery
Authors Lin JY, Bai DS, Zhou BH, Chen P, Qian JJ, Jin SJ, Jiang GQ
Received 17 September 2018
Accepted for publication 14 November 2018
Published 13 December 2018 Volume 2018:10 Pages 6961—6969
DOI https://doi.org/10.2147/CMAR.S187857
Checked for plagiarism Yes
Review by Single-blind
Peer reviewers approved by Dr Colin Mak
Peer reviewer comments 3
Editor who approved publication: Dr Chien-Feng Li
Jin-Yong Lin,1,2,* Dou-Sheng Bai,1,* Bao-Huan Zhou,1,2,* Ping Chen,1 Jian-Jun Qian,1 Sheng-Jie Jin,1 Guo-Qing Jiang1
1Department of Hepatobiliary Surgery, Clinical Medical College, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou, China; 2Department of Hepatobiliary Surgery, The Second Clinical College, Dalian Medical University, Dalian, China
*These authors contributed equally to this work
Background: Although the prognostic implications of negative lymph nodes (NLNs) has been reported for a variety of tumors, little information has been published about the NLNs in gallbladder cancer (GBC).
Patients and methods: In this study, clinicopathological characteristics and survival times of patients who had undergone surgery for GBC were collected from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program-registered TNM stage database and analyzed. Univariate and multivariate Cox proportional hazards models were used to identify the predictors of survival.
Results: It was found that a cutoff of one to two NLNs is optimal when assessing the association with survival, survival rates being consistently better with two or more NLNs than with fewer than two. This optimal cutoff value of 2 was identified as an independent prognostic factor by univariate and multivariate analyses (all P<0.001). Specifically, patients with two or more NLNs had better 5-year gallbladder cancer cause-specific survival than those with fewer than NLNs examined for stage I/II, stage III/IV, and all TNM stages (all P<0.001).
Conclusion: Our findings indicate that the number of NLNs is an independent prognostic factor after GBC surgery, and, together with the number of positive lymph nodes, this will provide better prognostic information than the number of positive lymph nodes alone.
Keywords: gallbladder cancer, SEER, surgery, survival analysis, negative lymph nodes
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