Association between menopausal state and prognosis of endometrial cancer

The purpose of our study was to examine the menopausal state as an independent prognostic variable of endometrial cancer and determine the conditions under which the menopausal state would be an independent prognostic variable of such cancer. We studied the clinical and pathologic variables of 255 patients with invasive endometrial cancer. In comparisons of the clinicopathologic variables between menopausal states, obesity and deep myometrial invasion were found more frequently in older patients than in younger ones. Multivariate analysis performed on 255 cases with complete pathologic data identified menopausal state, cervical invasion, pelvic lymph node metastasis, and tumor grade as prognostic variables. Univariate analysis revealed that survival of older patients with FIGO pathologic stage Ib disease was significantly poorer than in younger patients, while there was no significant difference in the analyses of stage Ic or advanced disease beyond stage II. We conclude that menopausal state was an independent prognostic variable for patients with early endometrial cancer, but not for patients with advanced disease.