The racial disparity of nasopharyngeal carcinoma based on the database analysis

To investigate whether the racial/ethnical disparity of nasopharyngeal carcinoma exists among the four major ethical groups in the United States named Asians, Caucasians, African Americans and Hispanics between the years of 1973 to 2013 using the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Result (SEER) database.

The National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database from 1973 to 2013 was utilized in this study to calculate survival trends for the four main ethical groups in the United States. The cases of nasopharyngeal carcinoma were extracted based on the SEER code cs0204schema. Death due to the diagnosed nasopharyngeal cancer was considered to be the event of interest, and death due to other causes was treated as the censoring events. Kaplan-Meier model was adopted to estimate survival outcomes; the Cox proportional hazards model was employed to do the hazard ratios (HR) estimation.

A total of 8068 eligible patients of nasopharyngeal carcinoma were identified. The cohort was composed of 40.69% Caucasians, 11.34% African Americans, 40.16% Asians and 7.81% Hispanics. According to the multivariate Cox regression analysis, Asians had a better survival prognosis against Caucasians (HR: 0.74, 95% CI: 0.65-0.84, P < 0.001). African Americans showed marginal worse survival prognosis compared with Caucasians (HR: 1.26, 95% CI: 1.07-1.49, P < 0.005). There was no significant difference between Hispanics and Caucasians (HR: 1.13, 95% CI: 0.92-1.39, P = 0.261).

Asians showed a disease specific survival advantage over Caucasians, African Americans and Hispanics, which was independent of sex, age at diagnosis, grade, TNM staging and treatment strategy.