Two staging systems for gastrointestinal stromal tumors in the stomach: which is better?

The prognosis of a gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) is influenced by its anatomic site; however, few studies on the prognosis of gastric GISTs have been reported. The aims of this study were to evaluate long-term prognoses of patients who underwent surgical resection for gastric GISTs and to compare the clinical efficacy of two staging systems: the National Institutes of Health (NIH) consensus criteria and the 7th Union for International Cancer Control/American Joint Committee on Cancer (UICC/AJCC) tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) staging system.

We conducted a retrospective observational study of 145 patients who underwent surgical resection for gastric GISTs between February 2001 and June 2012 at Pusan National University Hospital (Busan, Korea). Recurrence and 5-year recurrence-free survival (RFS) rates were analyzed.

During a median follow-up period of 44 months (range, 6-144 months), 11 recurrent lesions were detected in 9 patients (6.4%). On multivariate analysis, tumor size (>5 cm), mitotic count (>5/50 high-power fields), and epithelioid and mixed pathological type were significantly associated with recurrence. The overall 5-year RFS rate was 93.4%. Although no statistically significant differences were detected (C-statistic difference P = 0.886), all metrics showed lower values for the UICC/AJCC TNM staging system than for the NIH consensus criteria, suggesting that the UICC/AJCC TNM staging system may be a better model.

The 5-year RFS rate in patients who underwent curative resection for gastric GISTs was excellent. The UICC/AJCC TNM staging system may be more useful than the NIH consensus criteria for risk categorization of patients with gastric GISTs.