The IASLC Lung Cancer Staging Project: A Renewed Call to Participation

Over the past two decades, the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) Staging Project has been a steady source of evidence-based recommendations for the TNM classification for lung cancer published by the Union for International Cancer Control and the American Joint Committee on Cancer. The Staging and Prognostic Factors Committee of the IASLC is now issuing a call for participation in the next phase of the project, which is designed to inform the ninth edition of the TNM classification for lung cancer. Following the case recruitment model for the eighth edition database, volunteer site participants are asked to submit data on patients whose lung cancer was diagnosed between January 1, 2011, and December 31, 2019, to the project by means of a secure, electronic data capture system provided by Cancer Research And Biostatistics in Seattle, Washington. Alternatively, participants may transfer existing data sets. The continued success of the IASLC Staging Project in achieving its objectives will depend on the extent of international participation, the degree to which cases are entered directly into the electronic data capture system, and how closely externally submitted cases conform to the data elements for the project

IASLC Lung Cancer Staging Project: The New Database to Inform Revisions in the Ninth Edition of the TNM Classification of Lung Cancer

In the past 20 years, the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) has been working on a global project to revise the TNM classification of lung cancer. The first and second phases of the staging projects proposed recommendations for revision of the TNM classification, which were adopted by the Union for International Cancer Control and the American Joint Committee on Cancer as their seventh and eighth editions of the TNM classifications of lung cancer. For the third phase of the IASLC Staging Project, a new database of lung cancer cases diagnosed between January 2011 and December 2019 has been established. The Staging and Prognostic Factors Committee of the IASLC is in charge of the process of proposing new recommendations. The newly established database consisted of 124,581 cases. The data were obtained from Asia and Australia (56.0%), Europe (24.7%), North America (15.7%), South/Central America (3.4%), and Africa and the Middle East (0.1%). After cases with incomplete data are excluded, 87,043 cases were enrolled in the analysis, of which 52,069 (59.8%) were invasive adenocarcinoma and 15,872 (18.2%) were squamous cell carcinoma. Both clinical and pathologic stages were available in 44,831 (51.5%) cases. Analyses of this database are expected to provide proposals for changing the TNM classification toward the ninth edition, which is scheduled to be in use in January 2024. This newly established global database on lung cancer is described to provide fundamental elements for revisions of the TNM rules for staging lung cancer