Prognostic significance of neutropenia during adjuvant concurrent chemoradiotherapy in early cervical cancer

Objective: To evaluate the prognostic significance of adjuvant concurrent chemoradiotherapy-induced neutropenia with survival in patients with squamous cell carcinoma of the uterine cervix. Methods: Data from 107 patients with stage IB-IIB cervical cancer were retrospectively analyzed. The median follow-up was 37.5 (4.2-72.7) months. All patients had received radical surgery, including pelvic lymphadenectomy, followed by paclitaxel plus carboplatin-based concurrent chemoradiotherapy. Relative neutropenia, defined as an absolute neutrophil count <1,000/mm³ at the concurrent chemoradiotherapy cycle nadir, correlated to the pathologic findings and survival outcomes. Results: Sixty-six patients experienced neutropenia at least once during concurrent chemoradiotherapy, and demonstrated marginal improvement in disease-free survival (p=0.055), although not in overall survival. By subgroup analyses, the gain of disease free survival mainly originated from the node metastasis subgroup (p=0.033). Treatment-induced neutropenia proved to be the only significant independent factor for recurrence in cervical cancer (p=0.042) by multivariate analysis. Conclusion: Concurrent chemoradiotherapy-induced neutropenia may be a prognostic factor of recurrence in patients with cervical cancer. Individualized dose titration of the tolerable myelosuppression might be beneficial.