The survival impact of systematic lymphadenectomy in endometrial cancer with the use of propensity score matching analysis

OBJECTIVE: We sought to evaluate whether patients with endometrial cancer in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database who underwent lymphadenectomy demonstrate improved survival. STUDY DESIGN: The study population comprised 50,969 patients. The 3-year cause-specific survival was tested by using propensity score matching (PSM) analysis. RESULTS: The PSM analysis generated a balanced, matched cohort in which baseline characteristics were not significantly different. The benefit of systematic lymphadenectomy appears to be significant for presumed stage I International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics grade 3 cancers and presumed stages II-III cancer. The omission of lymphadenectomy in stage I did not appear to show a deleterious survival consequence if the differentiation grade was moderate (grade 2) or well (grade 1). CONCLUSION: Using PSM analysis, our results show no evidence of benefit in terms of survival for systematic lymphadenectomy in women with stage I endometrial cancer, except for grade 3 cancers.