David Ball

TL;DR: The methods used to evaluate the resultant Stage groupings and the proposals put forward for the 8th edition of the TNM Classification for lung cancer due to be published late 2016 are described.

TL;DR: Recommendations are to subclassify T1 into T1a, T1b, and T1c, and to group involvement of main bronchus as T2 regardless of distance from carina; to group partial and total atelectasis/pneumonitis as T1; to reclassify diaphragm invasion as T4; and to delete mediastinal pleura invasion as a T descriptor.

TL;DR: Advances in treatment that have seen the introduction of a new generation of chemotherapy agents, a proven advantage to adjuvant chemotherapy after complete resection for specific stage groups, new techniques for the planning and administration of radiotherapy, and new surgical approaches to assess and reduce the risks of surgical treatment are described.

TL;DR: Current N descriptors adequately predict the prognosis and therefore should be maintained in the forthcoming staging system, and it is recommended that physicians record the number of metastatic lymph nodes and to further classify the N category using new descriptors, such as N1a, N1b, N2a,N2b, and N3, for further testing.

TL;DR: In NSCLC, a single, early, posttreatment PET scan is a better predictor of survival than CT response, stage, or pretreatment performance status.