Marital status is an independent prognostic factor in inflammatory breast cancer patients: an analysis of the surveillance, epidemiology, and end results database

Objectives The aim of this analysis was to study the impact of marital status on inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) patients, as the prognostic impact is yet to be studied in detail. Methods Data of IBC patients from 2004 to 2010 were sorted out from the database of surveillance, epidemiology, and end results (SEER), and overall survival (OS) rates and breast cancer-specific survival (CSS) rates were compared between a group of married and unmarried patients. The comparison was performed by Kaplan–Meier method with log-rank test, and multivariate survival analysis of CSS and OS was performed using the Cox proportional hazard model. Results Data of 1342 patients were collected from the SEER database, on an average 52% of married patients ( n = 698, 52.01%) and 48% of unmarried patients ( n = 644, 47.99%) for this analysis. Married patients were more likely to be more younger (aged ≤ 56) (52.44% vs. 43.94%), white ethnicity (83.24% vs. 71.58%), HoR positive (48.28% vs. 41.61%), more patients received surgery (78.51% vs. 64.60%), chemotherapy (90.69% vs. 80.12%) and radiotherapy (53.44% vs. 44.41%) compared to unmarried group, and less likely to be AJCC stage IV (26.22% vs. 35.40%) (All P ˂ 0.05). Married patients had better 5-year CSS (74.90% vs. 65.55%, P