Thymomas II: a clinicopathologic correlation of 250 cases with a proposed staging system with emphasis on pathologic...

We present 250 cases of thymomas with emphasis on their clinical staging and follow-up. The patients were 120 males and 130 females between the ages of 13 and 92 years. Surgical resection was performed and histopathologic material evaluated in every case. Grossly, the tumors resected varied in size from 3 to 20 cm in greatest diameter. According to our proposed staging system, 31 cases were stage 0, 128 were stage I, 70 stage II, and 21 stage III at the time of resection. Histologically, approximately 53% of thymomas were of mixed histologic types. Follow-up information ranging from 1 to 16 years was obtained, showing significant statistical P values of .044 and .016 for overall and recurrence-free survival, respectively. We consider that our proposed staging system offers better stratification of cases and improved histologic definitions for proper staging of cases of thymoma.