Marital Status and Survival in Patients With Cancer

We used the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results program to identify 1,260,898 patients diagnosed in 2004 through 2008 with lung, colorectal, breast, pancreatic, prostate, liver/intrahepatic bile duct, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, head/neck, ovarian, or esophageal cancer. We used multivariable logistic and Cox regression to analyze the 734,889 patients who had clinical and follow-up information available.

Married patients were less likely to present with metastatic disease (adjusted odds ratio [OR], 0.83; 95% CI, 0.82 to 0.84; P