Journal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COLORECTAL DISEASE
Volume 36, Issue 12, Pages 2729-2737Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s00384-021-04023-4
Keywords
Colon cancer; Tumour-stroma ratio; Tumour budding; Tumour microenvironment; Personalised medicine
Categories
Funding
- Dutch Cancer Society (KWF)/Alpe d'HuZes fund [2016-10174]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The study evaluated the practical application of tumour-stroma ratio and tumour budding in colon cancer patients, finding that tumour-stroma ratio is a more reliable parameter in daily practice due to better reproducibility and independent prognostic value for disease-free survival.
The tumour-stroma ratio (TSR) and tumour budding (TB) are two high-risk factors with potential to be implemented in the next TNM classification. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the practical application of the two biomarkers based on reproducibility, independency and prognostic value. Patients diagnosed with stage II or III colon cancer who underwent surgery between 2005 and 2016 were included. Both TSR and TB were scored on haematoxylin and eosin-stained tissue sections. The TSR, based on the relative amount of stroma, was scored in increments of 10%. TB was scored following the consensus guidelines; a bud was defined as <= 4 tumour cells. For analysis, three categories were used. Cohen's kappa was used for reproducibility. The prognostic value was determined with survival analysis. In total, 246 patients were included. The TSR distribution was N = 137 (56%) stroma-low and N = 109 (44%) stroma-high. The TB distribution was TB-low N = 194 (79%), TB-intermediate N = 35 (14%) and TB-high N = 17 (7%). The reproducibility of the TSR was good (interobserver agreement kappa = 0.83 and intraobserver agreement kappa = 0.82), whereas the inter- and intraobserver agreement for scoring TB was moderate (kappa 0.47 and 0.45, respectively). The survival analysis showed an independent prognostic value for disease-free survival for TSR (HR 1.57; 95% CI 1.01-2.44; p = 0.048) and for TB-high (HR 2.01; 95% CI 1.02-3.96; p = 0.043). Based on current results, we suggest the TSR is a more reliable parameter in daily practice due to better reproducibility and independent prognostic value for disease-free survival.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available