Nomogram to predict cause-specific mortality of patients with rectal adenocarcinoma undergoing surgery: a competing risk analysis

BACKGROUND: Rectal adenocarcinoma is one of major public health problems, severely threatening people’s health and life. Cox proportional hazard models have been applied in previous studies widely to analyze survival data. However, such models ignore competing risks and treat them as censored, resulting in excessive statistical errors. Therefore, a competing-risk model was applied with the aim of decreasing risk of bias and thereby obtaining more-accurate results and establishing a competing-risk nomogram for better guiding clinical practice. METHODS: A total of 22,879 rectal adenocarcinoma cases who underwent primary-site surgical resection were collected from the SEER (Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results) database. Death due to rectal adenocarcinoma (DRA) and death due to other causes (DOC) were two competing endpoint events in the competing-risk regression analysis. The cumulative incidence function for DRA and DOC at each time point was calculated. Gray’s test was applied in the univariate analysis and Gray’s proportional subdistribution hazard model was adopted in the multivariable analysis to recognize significant differences among groups and obtain significant factors that could affect patients’ prognosis. Next, A competing-risk nomogram was established predicting the cause-specific outcome of rectal adenocarcinoma cases. Finally, we plotted calibration curve and calculated concordance indexes (c-index) to evaluate the model performance. RESULTS: 22,879 patients were included finally. The results showed that age, race, marital status, chemotherapy, AJCC stage, tumor size, and number of metastasis lymph nodes were significant prognostic factors for postoperative rectal adenocarcinoma patients. We further successfully constructed a competing-risk nomogram to predict the 1-year, 3-year, and 5-year cause-specific mortality of rectal adenocarcinoma patients. The calibration curve and C-index indicated that the competing-risk nomogram model had satisfactory prognostic ability. CONCLUSION: Competing-risk analysis could help us obtain more-accurate results for rectal adenocarcinoma patients who had undergone surgery, which could definitely help clinicians obtain accurate prediction of the prognosis of patients and make better clinical decisions.