Comparison of survival between the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) six and seven lung cancer staging systems in a resection cohort.

e17513 Background: The AJCC 7 lung cancer staging system was developed from a large international dataset. Unlike AJCC 6, AJCC 7 was less insistent on surgical staging, which is more accurate than clinical staging. AJCC 7 is more elaborate, moved some patients from their previous T and M categories, and assigned some patients to new stage groups. We examined the effect of these changes on a surgical cohort. Methods: Analysis was done for all curative-intent lung cancer resections in Memphis, TN from 1/1/04–12/31/09, excluding those with pre-operative therapy and those with no lymph nodes. Patients were assigned into AJCC 6 and 7 TNM groups. Survival was estimated by the Kaplan-Meier method. Survival curves were compared by the log-rank test. Results: Comparative stage grouping of the 1,125-patient cohort is shown in the table. The T or M category changed for 8% of patients: 53 (4%) to a higher, 47 (4%) to a lower category; 52% of the changes were from T2 to T3, 40% T4 to T3, 7% from M1 to T4 and 1% from T...