Prediction of Postoperative Survival in Young Colorectal Cancer Patients: A Cohort Study Based on the SEER Database

OBJECTIVE: Our aim is to make accurate and robust predictions of the risk of postoperative death in young colorectal cancer patients (18-44 years old) by combining tumor characteristics with medical and demographic information about the patient. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We used the SEER database to retrieve young patients diagnosed with colorectal cancer who had undergone surgery between 2010 and 2015 as the study cohort. After excluding cases with missing information, the study cohort was divided in a 7 : 3 ratio into a training dataset and a validation dataset. To assess the predictive ability of each predictor on the prognosis of colorectal cancer patients, we used two steps of Cox univariate analysis and Cox stepwise regression to screen variables, and the screened variables were included in a multifactorial Cox proportional risk regression model for modeling. The performance of the model was tested using calibration curves, decision curves, and area under the curve (AUC) for receiver operating characteristic (ROC). RESULTS: After excluding cases with missing information (n = 23,606), a total of 11,803 patients were included in the study with a median follow-up time of 45 months (1-119). In the training set, we determined that ethnicity, marital status, insurance status, median annual household income, degree of tumor differentiation, type of pathology, degree of infiltration, and tumor location had independent effects on prognosis. In the training dataset, taking 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years as the time nodes, the areas under the working characteristic curve of subjects are 0.825, 0.851, and 0.839, respectively, and in the validation dataset, they are 0.834, 0.837, and 0.829, respectively. CONCLUSION: We trained and validated a model using a large multicenter cohort of young colorectal cancer patients with stable and excellent performance in both training and validation datasets.