Development and Validation of Survival Nomograms in Patients with Primary Bladder Lymphoma

The existing studies on primary bladder lymphoma (PBL) are retrospective analyses based on individual cases or small series studies, and the research on PBL is not unified and in-depth enough at present because of the scarcity of PBL and the lack of relevant literature. This study is designed to develop and validate nomograms for overall survival (OS) and cancer-specific survival (CSS) prediction in patients with PBL.

According to the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database, 405 patients diagnosed with PBL from 1975 to 2016 were collected and randomly assigned to training (n = 283) and validation (n = 122) cohort. After the multivariable Cox regression, the OS and CSS nomograms were developed. The discrimination, calibration and clinical usefulness of the nomograms were assessed and validated, respectively, by the training and validation cohort. Furthermore, all of the patients were reclassified into high- and low-risk groups and their survival were compared through Kaplan-Meier method and log-rank test.

Age, subtype, Ann Arbor stage, radiation and chemotherapy were identified as independent prognostic factors for OS and age, sex, and subtype for CSS, then corresponding nomograms predicting the 3- and 5-year survival were constructed. The presented nomograms demonstrated good discrimination and calibration, which the C-index in the training and validation cohort were 0.744 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.705-0.783) and 0.675 (95% CI, 0.603-0.747) for OS nomogram and 0.692 (95% CI, 0.632-0.752) and 0.646 (95% CI, 0.549-0.743) for CSS nomogram, respectively. Furthermore, the nomograms can be used to effectively distinguish Patients with PBL at high risk of death. The clinical usefulness of the nomograms was visually displayed by decision curve analysis.

We updated the baseline characteristics of patients with PBL and constructed OS and CSS nomograms to predict their 3- and 5-year survival. Using these nomograms, it would be convenient to individually predict the prognosis of patients with PBL and provide guidance for clinical treatment.