Aim: The prognosis of colorectal cancer (CRC) individuals after curative resection is not satisfactory due to the early recurrence. We sought to identify the affecting features of early recurrence in CRC patients.
Methods: A total of 3500 CRC patients underwent curative resection were retrospectively incorporated into our study. Among them, 246 patients exhibited tumor recurrence: 121 had early recurrence (≤ 1 year after operation) and 125 had late recurrence (> 1 year after operation). A total of 246 CRC patients with recurrence were randomly assigned into the training group (N=177) or validation group (N=69) based on the ratio of 7:3. LASSO COX regression and support vector machine (SVM) were utilized to screen for the significant clinical indexes associated with the presence of early recurrence. Recurrent nomogram was created based on the above informative parameters to predict the probability of early recurrence.
Results: Proportion of advanced TNM stage, platelet count, systemic immune-inflammation index (SII), mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration (MCHC), CA-199, CA-125, lactate dehydrogenase, total bile acid (TBA), urea nitrogen were significantly higher in early recurrence group compared with that in late recurrence group. Results from LASSO COX regression and support vector machine (SVM) revealed that TNM stage, CA-199, CA125, SII and TBA were strong predictors for the presence of early recurrence among postoperative CRC patients in the training group. The recurrent nomogram based on the five predictors exhibited good predictive performance as calculated by C-index (0.846, 95% CI 0.789– 0.902 in the training group and 0.799, 95% CI 0.697– 0.902 in the validation group) for the prediction of early recurrence. Moreover, the recurrent nomogram exhibited not only encouraging calibration ability, but also great clinical utility both in the training group and validation group.
Conclusion: TNM stage, CA-199, CA125, SII and TBA were closely correlated with the presence of early recurrence of CRC patients. The recurrent nomogram held well predictive ability for the identification of CRC patients with early recurrence.
Keywords: colorectal cancer, early recurrence, recurrent nomogram, predictive model