Mahul B. Amin, MD, who earlier this year was named professor and chair of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and the Gerwin Endowed Chair for Cancer Research at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC), is the editor-in-chief of the eighth edition of the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) Cancer Staging Manual.
The manual outlines the rationale and rules for staging; the definitions of tumor, lymph node involvement and metastasis; stage groupings; and histologic grade.
AJCC’s cancer staging is the universally accepted standardized nomenclature to classify cancer. It provides those with cancer and their physicians with the critical standards for determining the best treatment approach for their disease and for defining prognosis and the likelihood of overcoming the cancer once diagnosed.
“The colon cancer staging update has several important new additions in staging and enlisting of genomic prognostic factors important for clinical care and for clinical trials stratification,” said David Shibata, MD, FACS, FASCRS, professor and Scheinberg Endowed Chair of the Department of Surgery at UTHSC and a member of AJCC’s colon cancer expert panel. The eighth edition of the AJCC TNM staging is effective for reporting of all cancer cases diagnosed on or after January 1, 2017.