Assessing the adequacy of lymph node yield for different tumor stages of colon cancer by nodal staging scores

BACKGROUND: According to the current official guidelines, at least 12 lymph nodes (LNs) are qualified as an adequate sampling for colon cancer patients. However, patients evaluated with less nodes were still common in the United States, and the prevalence of positive nodal disease may be under-estimated because of the false-negative assessment. In this study, we present a statistical model that allows preoperative determination of the minimum number of lymph nodes needed to confirm a node-negative disease with certain confidence. METHODS: Adenocarcinoma colon cancer patients with stage T1-T3, diagnosed between 2004 and 2013, who did not receive neoadjuvant therapies and had at least one lymph node pathologically examined, were extracted from the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database. A beta binomial distribution was used to estimate the probability of an occult nodal disease is truly node-negative as a function of total number of LNs examined and T stage. RESULTS: A total of 125,306 patients met study criteria; and 47,788 of those were node-positive. The probability of falsely identifying a patient as node-negative decreased with an increasing number of nodes examined for each stage, and was estimated to be 72% for T1 and T2 patients with a single node examined and 57% for T3 patients with a single node examined. To confirm an occult nodal disease with 90% confidence, 3, 8, and 24 nodes need to be examined for patients from stage T1, T2, and T3, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The false-negative rate of diagnosed node negative, together with the minimum number of examined nodes for adequate staging, depend preoperatively on the clinical T stage. Predictive tools can recommend a threshold on the minimum number of examined nodes regarding to the favored level of confidence for each T stage. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12885-017-3491-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.