A postmortem appraisal of a clinicopathologic staging system in large-bowel cancer

The autopsy findings of 100 patients who had a resection for large-bowel cancer and who were classified by a clinicopathologic staging system were analyzed. Seventy patients had carcinoma at autopsy. The value of this method of staging was assessed by relating the stage at operation to these findings. Forty-five per cent of early stage tumors (A or B) were found to have metastases. If the detection rate of occult metastases could be improved for stage A and B tumors, this might increase the prognostic accuracy of this staging system.