Objectives: Information on clinical characteristics, pattern of initial treatment and survival in patient with upper-tract urothelial carcinomas (UTUC) is scarce. Our study examined the racial/ethnic differences in patients diagnosed with incident UTUC.
Design: Observational study. The data analyses included: proportion and ANOVA for categorical and continuous variables, respectively; Kaplan-Meier method for calculating overall survival; and Cox-proportional hazards models for obtaining adjusted hazard-ratios.
Setting: Regions of the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER).
Patients or participants: 16,702 incident UTUC patients identified from the SEER dataset 1988-2007 (14,192 White, 967 Hispanic, 718 African American and 825 Asian).
Interventions: None.
Main outcome measures: Race/ethnicity-specific distributions of demographics, tumor characteristics, patterns of initial treatment, and survival.
Results: African American and Hispanic patients were diagnosed at a younger age than Whites and Asians (P = .001). Hispanics were more likely to be diagnosed with larger tumor size than Whites and Asians (P < .0001). Asians were more likely to be diagnosed with advanced stage and higher tumor grade. Cox-regression revealed that Whites and Asians were significantly less likely to die after UTUC diagnosis than African Americans (HR = .78, 95% Cl = .67-.91 and HR = .75, 95% CI = .61-.91, respectively; all P = < .01).
Conclusions: Our study found that Asians had worse tumor characteristics at the initial presentation than the other groups in this study, but that their risk of dying was lower. Further research is needed to include a larger number of Asian patients to examine subgroup differences and to confirm the paradoxical finding of higher survival with poor clinical characteristics.