The Performance of the Nottingham Prognosis Index and the Adjuvant Online Decision Making Tool for Prognosis in Early‑stage Breast Cancer Patients

Abstract

Background: Prognostic tools are widely used in the practice of Oncology and have beendeveloped to help stratify patients into specific risk‑related grouping. We sought to apply of two such tools used for patients with early‑stage breast cancer and to correlate them with actual outcomes.

Methods: A retrospective study was designed to include early‑stage breast cancer cases seen from 1994 to 2014 at the Seyedoshohada Hospital in Isfahan, Iran. Information was derived from the patients’ records, and indices were derived from prognostic tools. Information was analyzed using descriptive statistics and one sample t‑test.

Results: In 233 patients, the difference between the predicted overall survival (OS) by the Adjuvant Online (AO) prognosis tools (69.28) and the observed OS (71.2) was not statistically significant (P = 0.52), and the AO prognosis tools had predicted the patients’ OS correctly. In the Nottingham prognosis index (NPI), this difference in all groups except the very poor prognosis group was not statistically significant.

Conclusions: Adjuvant Online prognosis tools were capable of predicting the 10‑year OS rate although not in all of the subgroups. The NPI was capable of distinguishing good, moderate, and poor survival rates, but this ability was not visible in more specific groups with moderate and poor prognosis.

Keywords: Early‑stage breast cancer, Nottingham prognostic index, prognostic tools