Construction and validation of a nomogram model to predict the overall survival rate of esophageal cancer patients receiving neoadjuvant chemotherapy: A population-based study

The development of neoadjuvant chemotherapy(nCT) improves the overall survival (OS) of patients with esophageal cancer(EC). The aim of this study was to determine the independent prognostic factors of EC patients receiving nCT, and to construct a nomogram model for predicting OS. This retrospective analysis was conducted from the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results, Clinicopathological data of patients with EC who received nCT from 2004 to 2015. The included patients were randomly divided into the training cohort and the validation cohort. Univariate and multivariate Cox proportional hazards models were used to analyze the patients in the training cohort to determine the independent prognostic factors. Based on the independent prognostic variables, nomogram models for 1-year, 2-year and 3-year OS were constructed. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) and area under curve (AUC) were used to evaluate the discriminative ability. The calibration curves, decision curve analysis (DCA) and Kaplan-Meier (K-M) survival analysis were used to evaluate the predictive accuracy and clinical application value. A total of 2,493 patients were enrolled, with 1,748 patients in the training cohort and 745 patients in the validation cohort. Gender, marital status, tumor pathological grade, T stage, N stage, and M stage were identified as independent prognostic factor (