Background: Chinese doctors are required to inform cancer diagnosis to patients’ direct relatives rather than patients themselves. Patients may be hidden disease from their family members, and it may cause some serious results. Therefore, we carried out a retrospective study to evaluate whether indirect notification of cancer diagnosis can impact the prognosis of postoperative esophageal cancer patients in stage T3.
Methods: We selected postoperative T3 esophageal cancer patients hospitalized from June 2015 to December 2016 as research subjects, and divided them into a direct-notification group and an indirect-notification group. Several variables are allowed for evaluating 36-month progress-free survival of the two groups. Propensity score matching analysis were used to adjust selection bias.
Results: There were 72 patients enrolled in the study. Sex and indirect notification of cancer diagnosis were significantly predicted poor survival while stage, pathological differentiation, education background and age were not after propensity score matching analysis (P=0.02, 0.02, 0.30, 0.18, 0.07, 0.05, respectively). Cox multivariate regression analysis shows male and indirect notification of cancer diagnosis independentlly predict poor survival of progress-free survival of esophageal cancer at postoperative T3 stage (harzard ratio = 0.264, 95% confidence interval: 0.099-0.703, P=0.01; harzard ratio =2.823, 95% confidence interval: 1.360-5.861, P=0.01, respectively).
Conclusions: Indirect notification of cancer diagnosis is an important negative predictors of postoperative esophageal cancer patients' progress-free survival.