Incorporating non-biological factors into the TNM staging system for better prognostication and decision-making in testicular cancer.

BACKGROUND: We combined county-level socioeconomic status (SES), marital status and insurance status to introduce NBF-stage, which were further incorporated into the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) TNM staging system to generate an integrated staging system for better prognostication and decision-making for testicular cancer patients.

METHODS: 15,324 eligible patients diagnosed with primary testicular cancer between January 1, 2007 and December 31, 2015 were strictly selected from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database. Independent survival predictors were determined based on Cox proportional hazards model. The Kaplan-Meier survival curves were conducted to describe the difference in predicting survival probability and the Multivariate Cox proportion hazard regression analyses were established to compare the cancer-specific survival (CSS) and overall survival (OS) difference among NBF stages or NBF-TNM subgroups.

RESULTS: County-level SES, marital status and insurance status were independent prognostic non-biological factors (NBFs) in our study (P < 0.05). NBF-stage (combination of SES, marital status, and insurance status) was also an independent survival predictor in TC (P < 0.05). NBF1 patients had 167% increased risk of cancer-specific mortality (CSM) as compared to NBF0 patients in testicular cancer (P < 0.01). And NBF0 patients all had a better CSS as compared to NBF1 patients of the same TNM stage both in seminoma and non-seminomatous germ cell tumor (P < 0.05).

CONCLUSIONS: Incorporation of NBFs into AJCC TNM staging system in testicular cancer would potentially impact treatment decisions where treatments would not be rendered for a typically curable cancer with multi-modal therapy.