Gender impact on renal cell carcinoma survival: A population-based analysis.

e17099 Background: Prior evidence has suggested that females diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma (RCC) present at an earlier stage compared to males, but a survival difference between males and females has been controversial. We aimed to evaluate the impact of gender on RCC survival in the US. Methods: Data of RCC patients diagnosed between 1973 and 2015 in the US was obtained using Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database. We studied the overall and cancer-specific survival of patients diagnosed with RCC in the US according to gender using multivariable covariate-adjusted Cox models and Kaplan-Meier test. Results: We reviewed 155,430 RCC patients, of which 96,656 were males, and 58,774 were females. The median overall survival of female patients was 122 months and was significantly higher than male patients (98 months). Cancer-specific survival showed similar trends with females having significantly higher survival (p-value < 0.001). Adjusted for age, race, stage and grade of cancer, undergoing cancer-targeted surgery, and marital status, female sex was associated with improved overall and cancer-specific survival outcomes; HR = 0.829 (p-value < 0.001), and HR = 0.923 (p-value < 0.001), respectively. Conclusions: Females have a significantly better overall and cancer specific survival compared to males diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma. In previous studies this disparity was attributed to the lower grade and earlier stage of RCC presentation in females, but gender-based disparity persisted in this analysis after adjusting for patient baseline and tumor characteristics. This raises the question of the hormonal effects on the progression of RCC.