Table 2.

Multivariate Cox proportional hazard analysis for DFS and OS among patients with rectal cancer eligible for primary surgery

	DFS		OS
	HR (95% CI)	P	HR (95% CI)	P
Model before stepwise (stepAIC) selection
Age	1.14 (0.74–1.75)	0.5646	1.77 (1.3–2.42)	0.0003
Tumor (T) stage	1.63 (0.95–2.8)	0.0750	1.23 (0.8–1.88)	0.3535
N stage	0.42 (0.08–2.28)	0.3174	1.24 (0.43–3.54)	0.6885
LNR	4.03 (0.88–18.46)	0.0727	1.69 (0.7–4.1)	0.2426
VELIPI + (tumor emboli)	0.79 (0.18–3.45)	0.7564	0.57 (0.19–1.74)	0.3244
Immunoscore^a (I0 to I4)	0.62 (0.44–0.87)	0.0061	0.67 (0.5–0.89)	0.0053
Model after stepwise (stepAIC) selection
Age			1.66 (1.25–2.22)	0.0005
Tumor (T) stage	1.59 (0.94–2.7)	0.0836
LNR	1.88 (1.02–3.46)	0.0414	1.89 (1.31–2.72)	.0007
Immunoscore^a (I0 to I4)	0.62 (0.44–0.88)	0.0069	0.65 (0.49–0.85)	0.0019
UICC TNM Staging	1.43 (0.94–2.19)	0.0977	1.41 (1.01–1.98)	0.0437
Immunoscore^a (I0 to I4)	0.55 (0.39–0.79)	0.0009	0.62 (0.47–0.81)	0.0004

NOTE: All categorical covariates were transformed into numeric codes before they entered into the Cox model.

Abbreviation: AIC, Akaike information criterion.

↵^aLeave-one-out method. Correction using C = 1 − (SE[coef]/coef)²; heuristic shrinkage factor corrected with Holländer et al. (20).