AJCC stage groupings for head and neck cancer: Should we look at alternatives? A report of the head and neck sites task force
✍ Scribed by William M. Lydiatt; Jatin P. Shah; Henry T. Hoffman
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2001
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 137 KB
- Volume
- 23
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1043-3074
- DOI
- 10.1002/hed.1086
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The American Joint Committee for Cancer Staging and End-Results Reporting (AJC) was organized in 1959 to develop an acceptable system of clinical cancer staging. The efforts of this committee resulted in publication of the first Manual for Staging of Cancer in 1977. 1 The basis for this classification system followed a simple concept describing the life history of a cancer and used anatomic extent of disease as the primary determinant of classification. The concept was that an orderly progression of disease took place with enlargement of and invasion by the primary tumor [T] followed by spread to regional lymph nodes (N) and eventually spread beyond these nodes to distant sites (metastases [M]). The stage at diagnosis in the life history of the individual cancer was numerically assigned a TNM classification. These individual TNM classifications were then assembled into four groups-stage groupings (stages I-IV), each with similar survival outcomes based on the observation that better sur-