Related Experiment Videos
A multivariate analysis of prognostic factors in thymoma
1Department of Pathology, Veterans General Hospital-Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.
Background:
Considering the prognostic factors of thymoma, the clinical stage is the most important, while controversies exist about other clinicopathologic factors. A multifactorial study was carried out to clarify the relationship between prognosis and sex, age, tumor size, presence of myasthenia gravis, staging, epithelial subtyping, lymphocyte/epithelial cell ratio (L/E ratio) and other adjuvant pathological features.
Methods:
One hundred and thirty-seven cases were collected in Veterans General Hospital-Taipei from 1961 to 1993. The aforementioned features were studied. Kaplan-Meier's actuarial survival analysis was adopted, with Logrank test, to determine the significance of overall heterogeneity and trend. Cox proportional hazard model was also used for multivariate analysis.
Results:
Among all tested prognostic factors, staging had the highest significance (relative risk = 3.00, p < 0.001) and age had only a moderate one (relative risk = 1.04, p = 0.011). No other clinicopathological factor showed any statistical significance for prognosis.
Conclusions:
Staging remains of greatest usefulness in predicting the biological behavior of thymoma. The effect of age requires more investigation. Other clinicopathological features have no definite influence in survival expectancy.