Causes of Death and Conditional Survival of Renal Cell Carcinoma.

As conditional survival could provide more relevant prognostic information at each follow-up time, the present study aimed to assess conditional overall survival (COS) based on two cohorts and assess the risks of death due to renal cell carcinoma (RCC) vs. other causes. The Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center (FUSCC) and Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database were used as the source of data for our analysis. COS and cancer-specific survival were evaluated using the Kaplan-Meier method. A total of 90,927 patients (SEER cohort = 88,807, FUSCC cohort = 2,120) were enrolled. Our results suggest that hazards of other causes-related death were always higher than that of cancer-specific death in low-risk RCC patients, but lower in metastatic RCC patients. It exceeded that of cancer-specific death by 8 years in high-risk RCC patients. Only in metastatic RCC patients, the COS improved markedly with survivorship increasing. After surviving 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 years, the 5 years COS increased by +10, +18, +23, +29, and 35% (the observed 5 years OS: 12%), respectively. COS can better help patients with metastatic RCC rather than other RCC patients. Additionally, COS brings optimism for metastatic RCC patients with expected poorer prognosis psychologically.