During the 2018 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium in San Francisco, the staff at Renal and Urology News came across a story that included the findings from a study that suggests that different types of non-urothelial bladder cancers have different survival rates. One of the core findings included the fact that patients suffering from bladder adenocarcinomas are more likely to survive than those with small cell carcinomas.
In fact, adenocarcinoma of the bladder is related to a 5-year disease-specific survival (DSS) rate in patients of 58% whilst those people suffering with sarcomas feature a 5-year survival rate of 47%. At the same time squamous cell carcinomas offers a 5-year DSS rate of 37% and small cell carcinomas a 5-year DSS rate of 31%. The median survival for each of these cancer types are:
- 179 months for adenocarcinoma of the bladder
- 23 months for bladder sarcoma
- 15 months for bladder squamous cell carcinomas
- 17 months for bladder small cell carcinomas
The study was conducted by Jeanny B. Aragon-Ching, MD from the Inova Schar Cancer Institute in Fairfax, Virginia, and Donald Henson, MD, of the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, who identified 235,537 incident cases of bladder cases during the period 1988 to 2008. The research involved the use of Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program database and included 3096 cases of squamous cell carcinomas, 859 cases of small cell carcinomas, 89 cases of sarcomas, and 671 cases of adenocarcinomas.
“Non-urothelial cancers have a uniformly less favorable survival compared to urothelial cancers, highlighting the need for improved therapeutic strategies in these cohorts of patients,” the authors concluded in a study poster.
