Lung cancer in middle and southern Morocco

Determining risk factors associated with a fatal disease such as lung cancer (LC) remains an important key to understanding the factors related to its development and therefore using the correct emergent or accessible treatments. For that, we sought to highlight by describing, and analysing, the risk factors related to LC survival, reflecting the actual situation in Morocco.

We included 987 LC patients diagnosed from 2015 to 2021 at the Medical Oncology Department at the Mohammed VI University Hospital of Marrakech. An overview of the LC situation was described, and analysed, to determine the risk factors related to survival. The independent prognostic factors were determined using Cox Proportional Hazards Regression Analysis. To create a distinction between different risks group in the survival curve, stratification was done, respectively, within sex, age, histology type, treatments and radiation therapy.

We finally included 862 patients with 15 parameters among the 27 extracted, all meeting the inclusion criteria. 89.1% of the patients were male (n = 768) and 10.9% were female (n = 94), of whom 83.5% had a history of tobacco smoking (n = 720). The median survival of both sexes was 716 (5-2,167) days. The average age at diagnosis was 60 years. Five hundred and thirty-four patients presented with advanced stage. Patients above 66 years were the more diagnosed category with adenocarcinoma at T4N2M1c pathological category, and endocrinal comorbidity, in addition to pleurisy syndrome. Moreover, family history was found to be a bad prognostic factor. Interestingly, smoking status was not a bad contributor to survival. Age at diagnosis, histology subtype, performance status, haemoglobin, numbers of cures of the first-line chemotherapy, radiotherapy, anaemia and treatments were identified as risk factors related to survival.

We established a descriptive and analytical overview of the current LC epidemiology situation in the oncology division of Mohammed VI University Hospital in a non-industrialised state taking into account smoking status.