• BACKGROUND
    • The 8th edition American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) staging for soft tissue sarcomas of the trunk/extremities divides T stage into four categories and upstages nodal disease to stage IV. We used the National Cancer Database (NCDB) to evaluate the prognostic power of the new system.
  • METHODS
    • A total of 26,144 patients were identified from the NCDB from 2004 to 2013. Overall survival (OS) was compared using Kaplan-Meier and Cox proportional hazard models.
  • RESULTS
    • Including T3 (10 cm > × >15 cm) and T4 (> 15 cm) categories resulted in an increased number of patients classified as stage III (5120 as IIIA [19.6%] and 4280 as IIIB [16.4%], vs. 7882 [30.1%] previously), and there was a small increase in the number of patients classified as stage IV (2776 [10.6%], vs. 2565 [9.8%] previously). In the 7th edition, the hazard ratio (HR) for death increases with stage, with large incremental increases between stages II-III and III-IV. In the 8th edition, the HR for death demonstrates smaller incremental increases between each stage. Five-year OS for 7th edition T1 and T2 patients was 78.8 and 58.8% (p < 0.01), respectively, versus 62.6, 53.5, and 56.1% for T2, T3, and T4 patients, respectively, in the 8th edition (p < 0.01). Patients with isolated nodal disease (n = 211) had a better 5-year OS than those with distant metastases (33.1% vs. 12.4%, p < 0.001).
  • CONCLUSIONS
    • The AJCC 8th edition uses T stage to more accurately stratify OS in patients with large, high-grade tumors (T3/4) compared with those patients with T2 tumors, which facilitates risk assessment. The distinction between T3 and T4 may not be clinically significant. Patients with metastatic nodal disease have a survival outcome intermediate to those with stages III and IV disease.