Young Cervical Cancer Patients May Be More Responsive than Older Patients to Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy Followed by Radical Surgery

Objective
To evaluate the effects of age and the clinical response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT) in patients with cervical cancer who received neoadjuvant chemotherapy followed by radical surgery.
Methods
A total of 1,014 patients with advanced cervical cancer who received NACT followed by radical surgery were retrospectively selected. Patients were divided into young (aged ≤35 years, n = 177) and older (aged >35 years, n = 837) groups. We compared the short-term responses and survival rates between the groups. The five-year disease-free survival (DFS) and overall survival (OS) rates were stratified by age, NACT response, and FIGO stage.
Results
The overall response rate was 86.8% in the young group and 80.9% in the older group. The young patients had an earlier FIGO stage (P<0.001), a higher rate of adenocarcinoma (P = 0.022), and more lymph node metastasis (P = 0.033) than the older patients. The presence of adenocarcinoma as the histological type (P = 0.024) and positive lymph node metastasis (P<0.001) were identified as independent risk factors for survival. When stratified by age and clinical response, young patients with no response to NACT had a worse clinicopathological condition compared with the other subgroups. Compared with non-responders, responders to NACT had a higher five-year DFS rate (80.1% versus 71.8%; P = 0.019) and OS rate (82.6% versus 71.8%; P = 0.003) among the young patients but not among the older patients.
Conclusions
Responders to NACT aged 35 years or younger benefitted the most from NACT, while the young non-responders benefitted the least. Age might represent an important factor to consider when performing NACT in patients with cervical cancer.