Surgical stage III endometrial cancer: analysis of treatment outcomes, prognostic factors and failure patterns

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the survival estimates of stage III endometrial cancer patients, and also to detect the prognostic factors and failure patterns.

Sixty-eight surgical Stage III endometrial cancer patients treated at Hacettepe University Hospital were included. All patients underwent surgical staging procedures consisting of peritoneal cytology, infracolic omentectomy, total abdominal hysterectomy, bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy and complete pelvic-paraaortic lymphadenectomy. By surgical staging 26 (38%) patients had Stage IIIA and 42 (62%) patients had Stage IIIC disease. The mean resected lymph node number was 26 (median, 25; range, 15-58).

The median age was 60 years (range, 38-77), and the median follow-up period was 62 months (range, 36-90 months). The 5-year disease free survival rate was 58% and the 5-year overall survival rate was 64%. These figures for Stage IIIA were 60% and 68%, respectively; and for Stage IIIC they were 57% and 62%, respectively. No significant survival difference was detected between Stage IIIA and IIIC (p = 0.60 for disease-free survival and p = 0.48 for overall survival). High grade and positive peritoneal cytology predicted poor survival in both univariate (p = 0.004 and p = 0.006, respectively) and multivariate (p = 0.05 and p = 0.04, respectively) analysis. Twenty-eight patients (41%) had recurrence with a median time of 23 months (range, 10-54 months). Nine patients (13%) had only local, 13 patients (19%) had only distant and six patients (9%) had both local and distant relapse.

Surgical staging is important in the management of Stage III endometrial cancer, and the main problem is still distant failure. In multivariate analysis high grade and positive peritoneal cytology predicted poor survival significantly.