Marital Status, An Independent Predictor for Survival of Gastric Neuroendocrine Neoplasm Patients: A Population-based, Propensity Score-matched Study

Abstract

Background Marital status proves to be an independent prognostic factor in a variety of cancers. However, its prognostic impact on gastric neuroendocrine neoplasms (G-NEN) has not been investigated.Material and Methods We identified 3947 G-NEN patients from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database. Meanwhile, propensity scores for marital status were used to match 506 unmarried patients with 506 married patients. We used Kaplan–Meier method and multivariate Cox regression to analyse the association between marital status and the overall survival (OS) and G-NEN cause-specific survival (CSS) before matching and after matching.Results Married patients enjoyed better OS and CSS, compared with divorced/separated, single, and widowed patients. Multivariate Cox regression analysis indicated that unmarried status was associated with higher mortality hazards for both OS and CSS among G-NEN patients. Additionally, widowed individuals had the highest risks of overall and cancer-specific mortality compared to other unmarried groups in both males and females. Furthermore, marital status remained an independent prognostic and protective factor for both OS and CSS in 1:1 propensity score-matched analysis.Conclusion Marital status was an independent prognostic factor for G-NEN. Meanwhile, widowed patients with G-NEN had the highest risk of death compared with single, married, and divorced/separated patients.