Diagnosis and Treatment of Urologic Malignancies in the Philippines: A Multi-center Prospective Cohort Study (PUMA Study)

Abstract

Objective: To create a pilot urologic malignancy registry using demographic and clinical data of a cohort of patients newly diagnosed to have urologic malignancies in the year 2021.

Methods: This was a prospective cohort study conducted in four study sites: National Kidney and Transplant Institute, East Avenue Medical Center, UP-Philippine General Hospital and Batangas Medical Center.

Results: A total of 243 patients with newly diagnosed urologic cancers were enrolled. The median age was 61 years, with a wide range of 1 to 87 years. Most of the patients (81.47%) were male, while there were 45 females (18.52%) who had either urinary bladder, kidney or upper urothelial cancer. The most common type of malignancy was prostate cancer (34.57%), followed by kidney cancer (30.04%) and urinary bladder cancer (24.69%), consistent with the currently observed worldwide incidence. There were also 3 patients (1.23%) noted with multiple primaries. More than half of the patients (63.37%) received surgery as active treatment. After the two-year follow-up period, thirteen patients (5.35%) developed progressive disease, and 14 patients (5.76%) died.

Conclusion: This urologic cancer registry represents the first multi-center, investigator-initiated epidemiologic study of its kind in the Philippines. As a proof-of-concept (POC) project, it demonstrates the feasibility of establishing a national database capturing baseline data on the country’s most common urologic malignancies.