Age and sex
In the univariate analysis, sex was not a significant predictor of
survival. However, in the multivariate analysis, females had a
significantly lower risk of death (HR 0.284 p=0.037).
To test the hypothesis that, among patients with MEGCTs, there existed a
potential ‘threshold’ of age that characterised patients with worse
outcomes, the models were refitted modelling age as a penalised-spline.
Both the analyses conducted on OS (Fig. 1) and EFS (Fig. 2) suggested
that, after controlling for all other potential confounding factors, age
at diagnosis did not significantly affect the relative risk of death
(the confidence band includes the relative hazard = 1 for any age).