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Marital status and stage at diagnosis of cutaneous melanoma
Author(s) -
McLaughlin John M.,
Fisher James L.,
Paskett Electra D.
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
cancer
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.052
H-Index - 304
eISSN - 1097-0142
pISSN - 0008-543X
DOI - 10.1002/cncr.25726
Subject(s) - medicine , stage (stratigraphy) , epidemiology , marital status , socioeconomic status , logistic regression , melanoma , disease , surveillance, epidemiology, and end results , demography , public health , pathology , cancer registry , population , environmental health , cancer research , sociology , paleontology , biology
Abstract BACKGROUND: We evaluated the effect of marital status on risk of late‐stage cutaneous melanoma diagnosis. METHODS: Information about melanoma patients was obtained from Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER), 1973‐2006. A multivariable logistic regression model was used to estimate relative risks of late‐stage disease at diagnosis. RESULTS: After exclusion criteria, 192,014 adult melanoma patients remained for analyses. After adjustment for age, race, year of diagnosis, tumor histology, anatomic site, socioeconomic status, and SEER site, the relationship between estimated risk of late‐stage melanoma diagnosis and marital status was dependent on sex ( P < .0001 for interaction). Although unmarried patients had a higher risk of being diagnosed at a late stage among men and women, the magnitude of the effect varied by sex. Moreover, among married, single, and divorced or separated patients, men had more than a 50% increase in risk of late‐stage diagnosis when compared with women. Widowed men and widowed women, however, were not statistically different in their stage at diagnosis. CONCLUSIONS: Results from this study are important and may be used by clinicians and public health practitioners interested in increasing the proportion of melanoma patients diagnosed at an early stage through screening, perhaps by specifically targeting unmarried individuals in addition to having broad‐based skin cancer prevention programs. Cancer 2011. © 2010 American Cancer Society.