United European gastroenterology journal
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United European Gastroenterol J · Nov 2020
Tumour-stroma ratio has poor prognostic value in non-pedunculated T1 colorectal cancer: A multi-centre case-cohort study.
Current risk stratification models for early invasive (T1) colorectal cancer are not able to discriminate accurately between prognostic favourable and unfavourable tumours, resulting in over-treatment of a large (>80%) proportion of T1 colorectal cancer patients. The tumour-stroma ratio (TSR), which is a measure for the relative amount of desmoplastic tumour stroma, is reported to be a strong independent prognostic factor in advanced-stage colorectal cancer, with a high stromal content being associated with worse prognosis and survival. We aimed to investigate whether the TSR predicts clinical outcome in patients with non-pedunculated T1 colorectal cancer. ⋯ Our study emphasises that existing prognosticators may not be simply extrapolated to T1 colorectal cancers, even though their prognostic value has been widely validated in more advanced-stage tumours.