A model building exercise of mortality risk for Taiwanese women with breast cancer

BACKGROUND: The accurate estimation of outcome in patients with malignant disease is an essential component of the optimal treatment, decision-making and patient counseling processes. The prognosis and disease outcome of breast cancer patients can differ according to geographic and ethnic factors. To our knowledge, to date these factors have never been validated in a homogenous loco-regional patient population, with the aim of achieving accurate predictions of outcome for individual patients. To clarify this topic, we created a new comprehensive prognostic and predictive model for Taiwanese breast cancer patients based on a range of patient-related and various clinical and pathological-related variables. METHODS: Demographic, clinical, and pathological data were analyzed from 1 137 patients with breast cancer who underwent surgical intervention. A survival prediction model was used to allow analysis of the optimal combination of variables. RESULTS: The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, as applied to an independent validation data set, was used as the measure of accuracy. Results were compared by comparing the area under the ROC curve. CONCLUSIONS: our model building exercise of mortality risk was able to predict disease outcome for individual patients with breast cancer. This model could represent a highly accurate prognostic tool for Taiwanese breast cancer patients.