title: What is the optimal means of staging colon cancer?
abstract: Although staging for colon cancer has become more complex over time, it is not clear that this complexity has improved prognostic assessment. Even with revisions in the 7th edition of the AJCC staging system, a clear rank order of prognosis from substage to substage has not been established. Improved staging models will need to be developed, and attempts at further identifying those high-risk patients within each stage may be clinically useful. Through improved quality measures with lymph node yield, advances in colon cancer staging accuracy have been made over the last decade. Determining how to incorporate ultrastaging and molecular techniques will be the challenge for future staging models.
authors.affiliation: Department of Surgical Oncology, John Wayne Cancer Institute, Saint John's Health Center, 2200 Santa Monica Boulevard, Santa Monica, CA 90404, USA.
authors.forename: Elizabeth A
authors.initials: EA
authors.lastname: Arena
authors.forename: Anton J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Bilchik
mesh_terms: D003110:Colonic Neoplasms / Q000473:pathology*; D006801:Humans; D008198:Lymph Nodes / Q000473:pathology; D009367:Neoplasm Staging / Q000379:methods*; D011379:Prognosis; D015203:Reproducibility of Results