Clinical–alimentary tractSurvival From Malignant Digestive Endocrine Tumors in England and Wales: A Population-Based Study
Section snippets
Materials and Methods
All incident MDETs diagnosed in adults (aged 15–99 years) in the 55 million population of England and Wales during the 14-year period between January 1, 1986, and December 31, 1999, were linked with information from the National Health Service Central Register4 on deaths up to December 31, 2001, by the National Cancer Registry at the Office for National Statistics, and an anonymized extract was provided. Population-based regional cancer registries covering the entire territory of England and
Characteristics of MDETs
The 4104 endocrine carcinomas represented 0.6% of all incident digestive cancers in men during 1986–1999 and 0.7% in women (sex ratio, 0.96). MDETs were grouped into well-differentiated tumors (78.8%) and small cell tumors (21.2%; Table 1). Women were significantly more common among those with small cell tumors (58.8%; P < .001), but the sex ratio was close to unity for well-differentiated tumors. The mean age at diagnosis was 62.8 years (SD, 15.6 years) for patients with well-differentiated
Discussion
This study confirms that MDETs are rare, representing <1% of all malignancies of the digestive tract. The mean age at diagnosis of well-differentiated MDETs (63 years) is lower than for other digestive tract cancers (about 70 years for epithelial tumors). In hospital case series, the mean age at diagnosis is generally lower than in our study, suggesting that the oldest patients with MDETs are rarely seen in specialized centers.16, 17 One of the interests of this population-based study is to
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