Background: Marital status has been proved as an independent prognostic factor in many cancer types. However, no detailed investigation of marital status on squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) has been evaluated. The aim of this essay is to explore the relationship between marital status and SCC in 7 tumor sites.
Methods: All patients diagnosed with SCC were collected from the SEER database (1975-2016). We analyzed the survival of all included SCC patients in four marital status. We utilized propensity-score matching analysis to balance baseline characteristics between married and unmarried SCC patients in 7 tumor sites. The influence of marital status on overall survival (OS) in each site was performed by Cox regression analysis.
Results: A total of 180009 SCC patients were involved in this study. After propensity-score matching, patients in the married group were 1:1 matched with patients in the unmarried group for each sites. Married group exhibited higher 5- year OS rate than unmarried group (27.3% vs 19.8%). More precisely, being divorced and widowed were observed to be related to have worse survival than single patients in most sites. Furthermore, patients with clinical stage IV were more common in the unmarried group which having a lower proportion of receiving treatment.
Conclusions: This study indicated that marital status was a significant factor for OS of SCC in 7 tumor sites. Married patients always behaved more favorable than unmarried including single, divorced, and widowed patients.