Aim: The aim of the study is to collect and assess retrospective data on penile cancer patients from a period of 25 years. The expected outcome of the consolidation of the retrospective penile cancer database is a unique national dataset on a rare disease characterized over 2½ decades. This will represent important data to answer intriguing research questions, especially with respect to time trends and development over longer periods of time.
Specifically, we aim to describe and outline the cohort with respect to age, comorbidity, tumor, nodal and metastasis stage at diagnosis and treatments provided. We aim to analyze if centralization of disease management in 2009 has changed the nodal staging pattern and maybe even tumor stage as a result of increased awareness.
We also aim to analyze the development in treatment strategies over the past decades and study development in recurrence rates as less mutilating treatment has increased. We hypothesize that surgical treatment with smaller margins increases recurrence rates. We aim to analyze if increasing rates of recurrence as a result of organ-sparing surgical strategies comes with the cost of inferior prognosis or if prognosis with respect to overall survival and disease specific survival remains unaltered and justifies the change in strategy.
Method: The retrospective penile cancer database is transferred to a contemporary platform (RedCap) for secure and comprehensive data management and analysis. The variables have been defined by the Danish multidisciplinary group for penile cancer (DaPeCa), and the project is initiated and supervised by core members of this group. Validation and supplementary data harvesting will be the task of the PhD student and possible medical student assistants through retrospective medical record review.
Once data is secured, validated, and up to date data, analyses will be performed on STATA and R statistical software packages.
Status: May 2024: Data harvesting completed for all patients in Western Denmark from 2000-2023, for patients in Eastern Denmark from 2014-2020 (1200 patients).
