Nomograms for predicting overall and cancer-specific survival of patients with chromophobe renal cell carcinoma after nephrectomy: a retrospective SEER-based study

OBJECTIVE: We aimed to construct and validate nomograms to predict overall survival (OS) and cancer-specific survival (CSS) for patients with chromophobe renal cell carcinoma (chRCC) after nephrectomy. DESIGN: This study is a retrospective cohort study. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: There were 2810 patients with chRCC from Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results database diagnosed between 2010 and 2015 included in the study who were randomly divided into a training cohort (n=1970) and a validation cohort (n=840). Another single-centre external validation cohort containing 124 patients from our hospital was also involved in our study. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME MEASURES: OS and CSS. RESULTS: Nomograms for OS and CSS include four and five variables, respectively, from the result of least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regression analyses. Nomograms reveal the accurate discrimination by the area under the curve of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and C-indexes, with a C-index value of 0.777 (95% CI 0.728 to 0.826), 0.810 (95% CI 0.747 to 0.873) and 0.863 (95% CI 0.773 to 0.953) for the training cohort, the internal validation cohort and the external validation cohort in the nomogram for OS; and a C-index value of 0.884 (95% CI 0.829 to 0.939), 0.868 (95% CI 0.772 to 0.964) and 0.862 (95% CI 0.760 to 0.964) for the training cohort, the internal validation cohort and the external validation cohort in the nomogram for CSS. It was also proven that there was a high degree of conformance between the predicted and observation results by calibration plots. In addition, the comparison of ROC curves and C-indexes between nomograms and seventh tumour, node and metastasis stage demonstrated that nomograms were better in accuracy and efficacy ability. CONCLUSIONS: We successfully constructed two accurate and effective nomograms to predict OS and CSS for patients with chRCC after nephrectomy, which can help clinical doctors choose individual treatment strategies for chRCC patients.