Original Article


Prognostic significance of sites of extrathoracic metastasis in patients with non-small cell lung cancer

James E. Bates, Michael T. Milano

Abstract

Background: Metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) continues to have a poor prognosis despite recent advances in both targeted radiotherapy methodologies such as stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) and im-munotherapies. The impact of location of metastatic disease in patients with NSCLC has not been investigated; we aimed to investigate this using the Surveillance, Epide-miology, and End Results (SEER) database.
Methods: We included 39,910 patients from the SEER da-tabase treated for M1b NSCLC from 2010–2013. We identified patients with meta-static disease in the brain, lung, liver, and bone. We used Kaplan-Meier analyses and Cox proportional hazards models to assess the impact of varying sites of metastatic disease on overall survival (OS).
Results: Patients with disease coded as in the brain without other disease in the lung, liver, or bone had improved OS relative to all other comers with M1b disease (HR =0.84, 95% CI, 0.84–0.90, P<0.001). Likewise, patients with disease coded as in the bone without other disease in the lung, liver, or brain had improved OS relative to all other comers with M1b disease (HR =0.89, 95% CI, 0.86–0.92, P<0.001).
Conclusions: This hypothesis-generating analysis suggests that patients with limited metastatic NSCLC to the bone or brain may particularly benefit from aggressive upfront therapies.

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