A practical nomogram for predicting cancer-specific survival in patients with clear-cell renal cell carcinoma

Abstract

Background: It has limitations in predicting patient survival to use of the traditional American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) staging system alone.Objectives: We aimed to establish and evaluate a comprehensive prognostic nomogram and compare its prognostic value with the AJCC staging system in adults diagnosed with ccRCC.Patients and Methods: We used the SEER database to identify 24477 cases of ccRCC between 2010 and 2015. The patients were randomly divided into two groups. In the development cohort, we used multivariate Cox proportional-hazards analyses to select significant variables, and used R software to establish a nomogram for predicting the 3-year and 5-year survival rates of ccRCC patients. In the development and validation cohorts, we compared our survival model with the AJCC prognosis model to evaluate the performance of the nomogram by calculating the concordance index (C-index), area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), net reclassification improvement (NRI), and integrated discrimination improvement (IDI), and performing calibration plotting and decision curve analyses (DCAs). Results: Eleven identified independent prognostic factors were used to establish the nomogram. Age at diagnosis, being unmarried, higher grades, larger tumor size, higher AJCC stage, lymph node metastases, bone metastases, liver metastases, lung metastases, radiotherapy, and no surgery were risk factors for the survival of ccRCC. The C-index, AUC, NRI, IDI, and calibration plots demonstrated the good performance of the nomogram compared to the AJCC staging system. Moreover, the 3-year and 5-year DCA curves showed that the nomogram yielded net benefits that were greater than the traditional AJCC staging system.Conclusion: This study is the first to indicate that married status is an important prognostic parameter in ccRCC. Our results also demonstrate that the developed nomogram can predict survival more accurately than the AJCC staging system alone. The prognostic factors were easily obtained.