Development and validation of a prognostic nomogram to predict overall survival and cancer-specific survival for patients with anaplastic thyroid carcinoma

BACKGROUND: Anaplastic thyroid carcinoma (ATC) is a rare malignant tumor with a poor prognosis. However, there is no useful clinical prognostic predictive tool for ATC so far. Our study identified risk factors for survival of ATC and created a reliable nomogram to predict overall survival (OS) and cancer-specific survival (CSS) of patients with ATC. METHODS: A total of 1,404 cases of ATC diagnosed between 1983 and 2013 were extracted from on the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results database based on our inclusion criteria. OS and CSS were compared among patients between each variable by Kaplan–Meier methods. The Cox proportional hazards model was used to evaluate multiple prognostic factors and obtain independent predictors. All independent risk factors were included to build nomograms, whose accuracy and practicability were tested by concordance index (C-index), calibration curves, ROC curves, DCA, net reclassification improvement (NRI) and integrated discrimination improvement (IDI). RESULTS: Historic stage, tumor size, surgery and radiotherapy were independent risk factors associated with ATC according to multivariate Cox regression analysis of OS. However, gender was also an important prognostic predictor in CSS besides the factors mentioned above. These characteristics were included in the nomograms predicting OS and CSS of patients with ATC. The nomograms predicting OS and CSS performed well with a C-index of 0.765 and 0.773. ROC curves, DCA, NRI and IDI suggested that the nomogram was superior to TNM staging and age. CONCLUSION: The proposed nomogram is a reliable tool based on the prediction of OS and CSS for patients with ATC. Such a predictive tool can help to predict the survival of the patients.