Race and clinical outcome in endometrial carcinoma

To compare the outcomes of black and white women who have surgically staged endometrial carcinoma.

We retrospectively compared the clinicopathologic factors, socioeconomic status, treatments, and outcomes of 70 black and 302 white women who were treated for surgically staged endometrial carcinoma at our institution.

Black women had higher-grade tumors, less favorable histologic findings, more comorbid illnesses, and lower socioeconomic indices. A nonsignificant trend was also seen toward more advanced-stage disease. The extent of surgical staging and types of adjuvant therapies were similar. On univariate analysis, black women had worse 5-year disease-free survival than white women (52.8% versus 75.2%; P = .001). Other significant factors included stage, grade, lymph node status, extension to the uterine serosa, cervical involvement, histology, adnexal involvement, lymphovascular invasion, myometrial invasion, positive peritoneal cytology, level of education, and household income. After controlling for pathologic and socioeconomic differences in multivariate analysis, race remained a significant prognostic factor (P = .008; hazard rate 2.0; 95% confidence interval 1.2, 3.5).

In a large cohort of surgically staged and uniformly treated patients with endometrial carcinoma, black race was associated with significantly worse outcomes, even after controlling for clinicopathologic and socioeconomic factors.