Mortality Rate for Uterine Cancer

The mortality rate from aggressive, nonendometroid uterine cancer increased by 1.8% in recent years, according to results of a cohort study by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Considerable differences in mortality rates from uterine cancer were observed among non-Hispanic Black women.

To estimate histologic subtype and stage-specific rates of mortality from cancer of the uterine corpus post-hysterectomy by race and ethnicity, researchers used the U.S. Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results-18 Incidence-Based Mortality database and sourced hysterectomy data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance system.

Researchers examined age-adjusted hysterectomy rates associated with uterine cancer cases diagnosed between 2000 and 2017. They also considered deaths from uterine cancer that occurred between 2010 and 2017, adjusted to the 2000 U.S. standard population. These rates were expressed per 100,000 person-years (PY). They also calculated annual percent changes in these rates by using log-linear regression.

Using these methods, they found 16,797 deaths from uterine cancer among more than 208,587 women diagnosed with the disease from 2000 to 2017, for a hysterectomy-corrected mortality rate of 15.7/100,000 PY. Among Black individuals, this rate was the highest of any racial group at 31.4/100,000 PY, compared with 15.2/100,000 PY for White individuals, 12.3/100,000 PY for Hispanic individuals, and 9.0/100,000 PY for Asian individuals.

Rates of nonendometroid carcinomas among all women increased by 2.7% during the study period and increased the most in Hispanic women at 6.7%, compared with Black women at 3.5%, Asian women at 3.4%, and White women at 1.5%. Nevertheless, mortality rates from endometroid carcinoma remained stable during this period.

Researchers concluded that the differences in the mortality rates across racial and ethnic differences cannot be accounted for completely by subtype distribution and cancer stage at diagnosis.

“Despite stable incidence rates, endometroid cancer mortality rates have not decreased over the past decade at the population level, suggesting limited progress in treatment for these cancers,” researchers concluded.

—Ellen Kurek

Reference:

Clarke MA, Devesa SS, Hammer A, Wentzensen N. Racial and ethnic differences in hysterectomy-corrected uterine corpus cancer mortality by stage and histologic subtype. JAMA Oncol. Published online May 5, 2022. doi:10.1001/jamaoncol.2022.0009