Nomograms predicting overall survival and cancer-specific survival in osteosarcoma patients (STROBE)

The aim of this study was to develop nomograms to predict long-term overall survival and cancer-specific survival of patients with osteosarcoma.We carried out univariate and multivariate analyses and set up nomograms predicting survival outcome using osteosarcoma patient data collected from the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) program of the National Cancer Institute (2004-2011, n = 1426). The patients were divided into a training cohort (2004-2008, n = 863) and a validation cohort (2009-2011, n = 563), and the mean follow-up was 55 months.In the training cohort, 304 patients (35.2%) died from osteosarcoma and 91 (10.5%) died from other causes. In the validation cohort, 155 patients (27.5%) died from osteosarcoma and (12.3%) died from other causes. Nomograms predicting overall survival (OS) and cancer-specific survival (CSS) were developed according to 6 clinicopathologic factors (age, tumor site, historic grade, surgery, AJCC T/N, and M), with concordance indexes (C-index) of 0.725 (OS) and 0.718 (CSS), respectively. The validation C-indexes were 0.775 and 0.742 for OS and CSS, respectively.Our results suggest that we have successfully developed highly accurate nomograms for predicting 5-year OS and CSS for osteosarcoma patients. These nomograms will help surgeons customize treatment and monitoring strategies for osteosarcoma patients.