Embracing National Cancer Registries for Improved Care of Rare Tumors

Excerpt

Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is one of the scarcest but deadliest cancers. According to recent Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results data, the incidence in the United States is 0.72 persons per 1 million population’s The scarcity of ACC makes it nearly impossible for any single center to amass enough data for any meaningful conclusions. National cancer registries provide large volumes of data related to patient, tumor, and treatment characteristics. In this issue of Annals of Surgical Oncology, Gratian et al. used the National Cancer Data Base (NCDB) to analyze treatment patterns and outcomes for ACC as they relate to hospital volume.1 Patients at high-volume centers were more likely to undergo radical resection, lymph node evaluation, and chemotherapy. Despite more aggressive treatment, survival of patients treated at high-volume centers did not differ from that of patients treated at low-volume centers.1 This is a well-done study and could never have been done without large national cancer registries such as the NCDB. …