In this large international cohort of patients treated with first-line immunochemotherapy, outcomes following SCNS remain poor. However, a moderate proportion of patients with isolated SCNS who received intensive therapies achieved durable remissions.

Background Absolute measures of the impact of cancer stage on the incidence of venous thromboembolism (VTE) in patients with distinct cancer types have not been investigated in a large population-based cohort study. Objectives To investigate differences in the incidence rates of objectively confirmed VTE according to the development of cancer in a large population-based cohort study. Cancer type and stage at the time of diagnosis were taken into account. Patients and Methods The Scandinavian Thrombosis and Cancer Cohort includes data regarding cancer types, stages and objectively confirmed VTE diagnoses among 144 952 participants followed from 1993 to 2012. We studied stage-specific incidence rates of VTE, and calculated incidence rate differences (IRDs) for VTE according to stages in patients with 10 types of solid cancer. Results During the entire follow-up, 335 VTEs occurred, of which 293 occurred within 5 years. The IRD of VTE in patients with distant metastasis as compared with those with localized disease indicated large variation depending on cancer type. The highest IRD was observed for pancreatic cancer (IRD of 187.0 × 10 person-years [p-y]; 95% confidence interval [CI] - 6.7 to 380.8), and the lowest IRD was observed for prostate cancer (IRD of 3.7 × 10 p-y; 95% CI - 7 to 15.2). Regional spread as compared with localized disease also indicated large variation depending on cancer type; the highest IRD was observed for uterine cancer (IRD of 37.6 × 10 p-y; 95% CI - 23.7 to 99), and the IRDs for breast and prostate cancer were close to zero. Conclusion More advanced cancer at the time of diagnosis was associated with a higher risk of VTE, but the strength of the associations differed substantially between cancer types.

The Khorana score is recommended for guiding primary venous thromboembolism prophylaxis in cancer patients, but its clinical utility overall and across cancer types remains debatable. Also, some previous validation studies have ignored competing risk of death, hereby potentially overestimating venous thromboembolism risk. We identified ambulatory cancer patients initiating chemotherapy without other indications for anticoagulation using Danish health registries and estimated six-month cumulative incidence of venous thromboembolism stratified by Khorana levels. Analyses were conducted with and without considering death as competing risk using the Kaplan-Meier method versus the cumulative incidence function. Analyses were performed overall and stratified by cancer types. Of 40,218 patients, 35.4% were categorized by Khorana as low risk (score 0), 53.6% as intermediate risk (score 1-2) and 10.9% as high risk (score ≥3). Considering competing risk of death, the corresponding six-month risks of venous thromboembolism were 1.5% (95% CI 1.3-1-7), 2.8% (95% CI 2.6-3.1), and 4.1% (95% CI 3.5-4.7), respectively. Among patients recommended anticoagulation by guidelines (Khorana score ≥2), six-month risk was 3.6% (95% CI 3.3-3.9). Kaplan-Meier analysis overestimated incidence up to 23% compared with competing risk analyses. Using the guideline-recommended threshold of ≥2, the Khorana score did not risk stratify patients with hepatobiliary or pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, and gynecologic cancer. In conclusion, the Khorana score was able to stratify ambulatory cancer patients according to risk of venous thromboembolism, but not for all cancer types. Absolute risks varied by methodology but were lower than in key randomized trials. Thus, although certain limitations with outcome identification using administrative registries apply, the absolute benefit of implementing routine primary thromboprophylaxis in an unselected cancer population may be smaller than seen in randomized trials.