KEY TAKEAWAYS
- The study aimed to assess the clinical impact of preoperative suspicious EALNs on CT/PET images in advanced ovarian cancer.
- The results showed suspicious EALNs didn’t worsen prognosis in advanced ovarian cancer, but their survival impact remains unclear.
Kena Park and the team aimed to evaluate how preoperative suspicious extra-abdominal lymph nodes (EALNs) on CT/PET images impact patients with advanced ovarian cancer in clinical practice.
From 2006 to 2022, about 122 patients diagnosed with stage III or IV ovarian cancer underwent evaluation using preoperative CT and/or PET/CT images. The imaging studies assessed the presence, size, and location of suspicious EALNs. Suspicious lymph node enlargement was determined by a cutoff of ≥5mm short-axis dimension on CT and/or lesions with maximum standardized uptake values of ≥2.5 on PET/CT. The study exclusively enrolled patients who had not undergone surgical removal of their EALNs.
Of 109 eligible patients, 36 (33%) were categorized as “node-positive” due to suspicious EALNs. Median overall survival (OS) was 45.73 months for “node-positive” and 46.50 months for “node-negative” patients (HR 1.17, 95% CI [0.68-2.00], P= 0.579).
In multivariate analysis, suspicious EALNs showed no clinical significance on OS (aHR 1.20, 95% CI [0.67-2.13], P= 0.537) or progression-free survival (PFS) (aHR 1.43, 95% CI [0.85-2.41], P= 0.174) after adjusting for other variables selected through backward elimination (P< 0.20). Old age (aHR 2.23, 95% CI [1.28-3.89], P= 0.005) and platinum resistance (aHR 1.92, 95% CI [1.10-3.36], P= 0.023) adversely affected OS.
The study concluded that suspicious EALNs did not exacerbate the prognosis of patients with advanced ovarian cancer. However, their effect on survival remains unclear. Further investigation is necessary to determine the clinical significance of suspicious EALNs in preoperative imaging studies.
No funding was received.
Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38805507/
Park K, Kwon JY, Song JM, et al. (2024). “Prognostic impact of suspicious extraabdominal lymph nodes on patient survival in advanced ovarian cancer.” PLoS One. 2024 May 28;19(5):e0299205. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0299205. PMID: 38805507.
