Objective: A descriptive analysis of 35 patients with transitional cell carcinoma of the upper urinary tract is presented. The actuarial survival was analyzed to determine which circumstances associated with superficial bladder cancer had a prognostic significance.
Methods: The records of 35 patients with upper urothelial tumor diagnosed from 1987 to 1993 were retrospectively analyzed. A descriptive statistical analysis was performed on all the variables. Correlation was determined by Pearson's Xi2 test, Yates' and Fisher's exact test. McNemar's test was used to determine which diagnostic method had the highest yield. The actuarial survival data were analyzed with the Kaplan-Meier and Mantel-Haenzel test.
Results: Patient mean age was 67.74 yrs, mean follow up was 26.83 months, 40% were ureteral tumors, 25.7% were pelvic tumors, 60.6% were superficial tumors and 62.6% were GI and GII, 48.5% were associated with bladder tumors and no correlation was found between the grade and stage of bladder relapses and the upper urinary tract tumors. Intravenous urography demonstrated function was abolished in 45.5%. Cytology gave the highest diagnostic yield (84.6%). Nephroureterectomy with perimeatal cystectomy was the surgical technique most frequently used (57.1%). To date, 71.4% of the patients have survived. Significantly women demonstrated the most undifferentiated cellular grade (p < 0.001), although no prognostic value was found for sex. 95% of the patients with non-infiltrating tumor stages and 95% of the patients with GI-GII tumors survived, whereas 61.5% of the patients with infiltrating tumors and 58.3% of those with GIII tumors did not survive (p < 0.002). Evidently, the grade of cellular differentiation and the stage of infiltration were interrelated (p < 0.002). Analysis of the actuarial survival data showed that the probability of survival after 24 months (mean follow up) was 67.07% and the probability of reaching 74 months (maximum follow up) was 60.04%.
Conclusions: After a comparative analysis of the survival with the Mantel-Haenzel test, it was found that the grade of cellular differentiation (p < 0.001) and stage of infiltration (p < 0.01) had significant differences in the survival curves.