Overall Survival in Patients with Mucinous Carcinoma of Breast: A Population-Based Study

Abstract

Purpose

Mucinous carcinoma of the breast (MCB) is a rare malignant tumour. Therefore, it is urgent to establish a survival prediction model for MCB patients.

Methods

Clinicopathological and follow-up data of MCB patients diagnosed between 2010 and 2015 were retrieved from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Result (SEER) database. The significant factors were screened out and generated Kaplan–Meier (K-M) curves for each prognostic factor. Additionally, these factors were then utilized to build a nomogram for predicting 3-, 4-, and 5-year overall survival (OS) of MCB patients. The nomogram was evaluated using calibration curves, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and decision curve analysis (DCA).

Results

Moreover, a total of 4326 MCB patients were retrieved. Age, American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) stage, surgery, radiotherapy and bone metastasis were identified as independently prognosis factors for OS. The corresponding areas under the ROC curves (AUCs) of the nomogram at 3, 4 and 5 years in the training and validation set were 0.770, 0.788, 0.805, 0.778, 0.797, and 0.802, respectively. The calibration curves and DCA revealed that the prediction model had an excellent performance. Finally, the risk stratification system confirmed that the powerful role of the nomogram in distinguishing results and risk stratification.

Conclusion

Briefly, the nomogram incorporating various clinicopathological indicators was established for MCB patients and may facilitate clinical decision-making.

Keywords:

• mucinous carcinoma of the breast
• breast cancer
• prognosis
• nomogram

Abbreviations

MCB, Mucinous carcinoma of the breast; SEER, Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Result; K-M, Kaplan–Meier; ROC, receiver operating characteristic; DCA, decision curve analysis; AJCC, American Joint Committee on Cancer; AUCs, areas under the ROC curves; IDC, infiltrating ductal carcinoma; ER, estrogen receptor; PR, progesterone receptor; HER2, human epidermal growth factor 2-neu; BCS, breast-conserving surgery.

Ethics Statement

SEER belongs to public databases. The patients involved in the database have obtained ethical approval. Users can download relevant data for free for research and publish relevant articles. Our study is based on open source data, so there are no ethical issues.

Ethics Approval and Informed Consent

All information from the SEER program is available and free for public and approval was obtained from the Ethics Committee of First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the National Cancer Institute for providing the SEER data.

Author Contributions

All authors contributed to study design, acquisition, and analysis of data, and writing and revising manuscripts and reached a consensus on the journal to which the article was submitted, approved the final version to be published and agreed to be responsible for all content of the article.

Disclosure

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ningxia Natural Science Foundation Project 2021 [grant number 2021AAC03523].