Treatment of adenocarcinoma of the endometrium at Memorial-James Ewing Hospitals, 1949-1965.

This retrospective study of patients receiving initial therapy for endometrial adenocarcinoma at Memorial-James Ewing Hospitals from 1949-1965 confirmed that the most important factor related to survival was extent of disease at presentation. Those patients with spread beyond the corpus had a much poorer prognosis regardless of method of therapy. Within Stage I, histologic grade and depth of myometrial penetration were of much greater prognostic significance than uterine size. Advanced age was associated with a higher incidence of poorly differentiated tumors. Apparently for Stage I, simple hysterectomy alone was not as effective as simple hysterectomy combined with preoperative radium or radical hysterectomy with or without node dissection. There was a 6% incidence of positive nodes when node dissection was performed in Stage I patients who had no spread of disease to the cervix confirmed at operation. Pure vaginal recurrence rate was low for all methods of therapy in Stage I. Eradication of recurrences by any means was relatively ineffective.