Establishment of a staging system for visceral sarcoma

Visceral sarcoma is a rare malignancy with a poor prognosis. However, there is no recommended prognostic staging system for the malignant disease.

We analyzed the data of patients diagnosed with primary soft tissue sarcoma (STS) of the abdomen and thoracic visceral organs between 2006 and 2017 at our hospital. Prognostic factors (size, tumor grade, and lymph node metastasis) were analyzed in our cohort (n = 203) and the SEER validation cohort (n = 5826).

Tumor size, grade, and lymph node metastasis were important prognostic factors for visceral sarcoma in both our and the SEER cohorts. Based on these prognostic factors, we established a new staging system for visceral sarcoma, by which patients could be stratified into clinically meaningful and non-overlapping stages in both our cohort and the SEER validation series. Moreover, the area under the curve (AUC) value of the staging system for 5-year survival was 0.84 (95% CI: 0.78-0.89) in our series and 0.80 (95% CI: 0.79-0.81) in SEER series, respectively. In addition, compared with the widely used FIGO staging system for female genital sarcoma, the visceral sarcoma staging system could more effectively and reliably stratify patients into four different prognostic groups.

The visceral sarcoma staging system is applicable for STS of the abdomen and thoracic visceral organs and is better than the current FIGO staging system for female genital sarcoma and should be incorporated into the AJCC Cancer Staging Manual.