Establishing a Correlation of Clinical Characteristics with the Level of Tumor Mutation Burden in Urothelial Bladder Carcinoma

Bladder cancer is a complex disease and one of the most lethal types of cancer. Recently, some malignancies, including bladder carcinomas, have shown better results with immunotherapy using immune checkpoint inhibitors. Tumor mutational burden (TMB) is a potential biomarker for predicting tumor behavior and immunotherapy response as an outcome. Publicly available clinical data from the bladder cancer of TCGA project is used to analyze correlations of clinical variables with an increased tumor mutation burden (TMB) number compared with those with a lower number of mutations. The threshold for the high mutation burden in the analysis was set at 10 mutations (Mut) per Megabase (Mb). The Chi-Square test (χ
2
) was used to compare categorical data. The Chi-Square "Best first" method was used to find a correlation between clinical variables and TMB, then compared with the p-value of significance (p<0.05). A significant correlation was found between TMB and Race, Neoplasm Histologic Grade, and gender when applying the Best First/Chi-Square method to clinical variables and level of TMB. This enables further investigation and application of the prediction models of the level of TMB, responsiveness to immunotherapy, and prognosis based on the clinical features of the patients.