Abstract
Purpose
We aim to develop an immune-score nomograms for predicting overall survival (OS) of patients with HNSCC and assess the association of immune scores with prognosis.
Methods
The data of 530 patients used in this study were retrieved from The Cancer Genome Atlas database. The optimization cut‐point for immune scores was expressed by X-tile 3.6.1 tool. Possible prognostic factors from univariate Cox analysis were further included in a multivariate Cox proportional hazards analysis to obtain significant risk factors. Prognostic nomograms were constructed based on the factors of significant multivariate prognostic using R version 3.5.1. A calibration map was generated by comparing the nomogram prediction probability and the observation for the 3-year and 5-year OS rates.
Results
We retrospectively analyzed 462 patients downloaded from TCGA dataset. Prognostic nomograms was integrated following risk factors of significant multivariate prognostic, such as age, angiolymphaic invasion (AI), perineura invasion(Per_invasion),tumor site, immune score, tumor-node-metastasis(TNM) stage. The concordance Index (C-index) for OS predictions was 0.723 (95% CI 0.671–0.785). Moreover, we compared the powerful efficiency of the nomograms with that of the TNM staging system. OS prediction determined on immune score set compared with the TNM staging with C-index = 0.723 vs 0.612. The calibration curves for the probability of OS of 3-year or 5-year showed no deviations between the prediction by nomograms and actual reference line.
Conclusion
The present study indicate that high and intermediate immune scores are as independent prognostic variables for OS of head–neck squamous cell carcinoma patients. We constructed novel nomograms may has the potential to provide individualized survival risk assessments and guide treatment decisions.
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Data availability statement
The data used to support the findings of this study are included within the article.
Abbreviations
- AI:
-
Angiolymphaic invasion
- AJCC:
-
American Joint Committee on Cancer
- C-index:
-
Concordance Index
- HNSCC:
-
Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma
- HPV:
-
Human papillomavirus
- OS:
-
Overall survival
- TNM:
-
Tumor-node-metastasis
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The authors thank the efforts of the National Cancer Institute in the creation of the TCGA database.
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WL and ZW conceived and designed the study; WL collected the data. KZ and ZW analyzed the data. WL and KZ contributed to the writing of the manuscript.
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Li, W., Zhao, K. & Wang, Z. Prognostic nomograms based on immune scores for head–neck squamous cell carcinoma patients. Eur Arch Otorhinolaryngol 278, 2493–2500 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00405-020-06358-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00405-020-06358-0