Equipping the American Joint Committee on Cancer staging for resectable pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma with tumor grade: a recursive partitioning analysis

Previous studies of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) have demonstrated that the addition of tumor grade to the 7th American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) staging can provide improved prognostication and that the recently proposed 8th edition AJCC staging exhibited superior reproducibility to the 7th edition in resectable PDAC. Thus, we aimed to combine tumor grade and 8th AJCC stage to develop a refined staging scheme for resectable PDAC. We analyzed 7719 patients with resectable PDAC from the 2004–2012 Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database. We performed recursive partitioning analysis (RPA) to objectively incorporate tumor grade with 8th AJCC stage into a novel staging system. The performance of the proposed RPA staging was assessed against the 8th AJCC staging in terms of discriminatory ability and prognostic homogeneity. For each 8th AJCC stage, survival was significantly worse for high-grade versus low-grade tumors. RPA divided resectable PDAC into five stages: RPA-IA (low-grade T1N0), RPA-IB (high-grade T1N0 or low-grade T2N0), RPA-IIA (high-grade T2N0 or low-grade T3N0/T1–T3N1), RPA-IIB (high-grade T3N0/T1–T3N1 or low-grade T1–T3N2), and RPA-III (high-grade T1–T3N2; median survival: 42, 26, 19, 15, and 12 months, respectively; P < 0.001). The RPA staging outperformed the 8th AJCC classifications in terms of discrimination (concordance index, 0.585 versus 0.565; P < 0.001) and prognostic homogeneity. Tumor grade can provide additional prognostic information to the 8th AJCC staging. The proposed RPA staging is a superior risk-stratified tool to the 8th AJCC staging and is not substantially more complex.