Comparison of clinicopathologic features, survival, and demographics in sebaceous carcinoma patients with and without Muir-Torre syndrome

Background

Visceral malignancies in patients with Lynch syndrome behave less aggressively than in those without Lynch syndrome. The behavior of sebaceous carcinoma (SC) in Muir-Torre syndrome (MTS), a variant of Lynch syndrome, is incompletely investigated.

Objective

To investigate features and survival of SC patients with and without MTS.

Methods

Retrospective cohort study in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results 17 database from 2000 to 2019 of patients with SC. Patients were classified as MTS or non-MTS cases based on a threshold score of 2 on the Mayo MTS risk score.

Results

We identified 105 (2.8%) MTS cases and 3677 (97.2%) non-MTS cases. On univariate analysis, MTS patients were younger, had a higher proportion of tumors outside the head/neck, and had fewer high-grade tumors. On Kaplan-Meier analysis, MTS patients trended toward having better SC-specific survival. On multivariate Cox proportional hazards analysis adjusting for other covariates, MTS status was an independent predictor of worse overall survival. However, there was no association between MTS status and SC-specific survival.

Limitations

Given relatively high disease-specific survival in SC, our study may have been underpowered to detect a difference on Kaplan-Meier analysis.

Conclusions

Our study suggests SC does not behave more aggressively in patients with MTS.