The effect of addition of chemotherapy to radiotherapy in the treatment of women with cervical cancer: a survival analysis using propensity score

Abstract

To compare the overall survival of patients with cervical cancer treated exclusively with radiotherapy with that of patients treated with a combination of radio and chemotherapy. Material and methods. Retrospective analysis of all cases of cervical cancer registered at the Brazilian National Cancer Institute between 1999 and 2004, treated with radiotherapy exclusively or in combination with chemotherapy. The Kaplan–Meier curve and the log-rank test were used to assess overall survival. The Cox model and the propensity score were used for multivariate analysis. Results. A total of 2584 patients were studied, and the clinical and epidemiological characteristics of the cohort were described. The combination of chemotherapy with radiotherapy provided an improvement in survival when compared with radiotherapy exclusively (HR-0.69; pb0.001), which persisted after multivariate analysis (HR-0.72; pb0.001). Conclusion. There was a beneficial effect of adding chemotherapy to radiotherapy on this cohort.