Objective: Reports from cancer registries often lack clinically relevant information, which would be useful in estimating the prognosis of individual patients with urothelial carcinoma of the urinary bladder (UCB). This article presents estimates of crude probabilities of death due to UCB and the expected loss of lifetime stratified for patient characteristics.
Materials and methods: In Norway, 10,332 patients were diagnosed with UCB between 2001 and 2010. The crude probabilities of death due to UCB were estimated, stratified by gender, age and T stage, using flexible parametric survival models. Based on these models, the loss in expectation of lifetime due to UCB was also estimated for the different strata.
Results: There is large variation in the estimated crude probabilities of death due to UCB (from 0.03 to 0.76 within 10 years since diagnosis) depending on age, gender and T stage. Furthermore, the expected loss of life expectancy is more than a decade for younger patients with muscle-invasive UCB and between a few months and 5 years for nonmuscle-invasive UCB.
Conclusions: The suggested framework leads to clinically relevant prognostic risk estimates for individual patients diagnosed with UCB and the consequence in terms of loss of lifetime expectation. The published probability tables can be used in clinical praxis for risk communication.
Keywords: Bladder cancer; crude survival; epidemiology; loss of lifetime expectancy; survival; urothelial carcinoma of the urinary bladder.