Is Adjuvant Chemotherapy Necessary in Patients with Early Endometrial Cancer?

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: We investigated whether there was a difference in prognosis between patients with stage IA endometrial cancer with and without lymphovascular space invasion. METHODS: We enrolled patients with stage IA (pT1aN0M0) endometrial cancer admitted to our hospital from 2009 to 2018. All patients underwent hysterectomy, bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy, and systematic pelvic lymphadenectomy. We immunopathologically evaluated the presence or absence of lymphovascular space invasion in the tumor tissue using hematoxylin and eosin, Elastica-van Gieson, and podoplanin staining. We analyzed disease-free and overall survival and calculated patients' survival distribution using the Kaplan-Meier method and log-rank test. The multivariate analysis was performed to determine the prognostic factors. RESULTS: A total of 116 patients were included. The median age of the patients was 57 (range, 30-78) years, and the histological subtype revealed 98 and 18 cases of types 1 and 2, respectively. The median follow-up period was 71.9 (range, 10.8-149) months, and the 3-year disease-free and 3-year overall survival rates were 94% and 99%, respectively. The disease-free and overall survival rates were significantly shorter in type 2 patients than in type 1 patients (type 2 vs. type 1; 77% vs. 97%, P < 0.01, 94% vs. 100%, P = 0.014, respectively). The univariate and multivariate analyses showed that there were no significant differences in disease-free survival between the lymphovascular space invasion-positive and -negative groups among type 1 cases. CONCLUSION: There was no difference in prognosis between patients with stage IA and type 1 endometrial cancer with and without lymphovascular space invasion.