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Ann Thorac Surg 2003;76:1864-1865
© 2003 The Society of Thoracic Surgeons

Invited commentary

Massachusetts General Hospital, Blake 1570, 55 Fruit St, Boston, MA 02114, USA

e-mail: wright.cameron@mgh.harvard.edu

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

Doctors Kondo and Monden have organized a large contemporary database to see if the TNM staging system would fit thymic epithelial tumors. After a careful review of their data I believe the answer to be no for thymoma and maybe for thymic carcinoma. A staging system is valuable to estimate prognosis, decide on therapy and to compare results. Most would agree that simplicity and clinical validity are the two cardinal features of a successful staging system. Unnecessary subdivisions of tumor characteristics result in survival curves that do not separate well (and hence reduce the statistical difference between groups of patients) and make the system needlessly complex and difficult to remember. Clinical validity . . . [Full Text of this Article]