ABSTRACT
Although penile carcinoma is a rare malignancy, there is still an unmet need to identify prognostic factors associated with poor survival. In this study, we utilized demographic and clinical information to identify the most informative variables associated with overall survival in patients with penile cancer. From a full model including all covariates found to be statistically significant in univariable analyses, we identified a parsimonious reduced model containing tumor site (penis glans: hazard ratio [HR] = 0.48; 95% CI: 0.28-0.85 and penis not otherwise specified: HR = 0.45; 95% CI: 0.25-0.84), undetermined tumor differentiation (HR = 0.48; 95% CI: 0.27-0.86), and TNM stage III/IV (HR = 2.83; 95% CI: 1.68-4.75). When all of the covariates from the full model were subjected to classification and regression tree analysis, we identified 6 novel risk groups. Of particular interest, we found marriage was associated with substantial improvement in survival among men with the same stage and disease site. Specifically, among single/widowed/divorced men with TNM stage 0-II and prepuce/penis corpus/overlapping lesions had worse survival (5-year survival = 18.2%) versus married men (5-year survival = 62.5%). Since marital status is linked to social support, these findings warrant a deeper investigation into the relationships between disease prognosis and social support in patients with penile carcinoma.
