The new, 7th Edition of the TNM (tumor, nodes, metastases) staging system for lung cancer came into use earlier this year and has led to changes in the staging of about 15% of lung cancers compared with what they'd have been staged as under the 6th edition.

This is the first of the presentations by guest speakers at our NSCLC Patient Education Forum back in September. Dr. Gerard Silvestri is a pulmonologist, a lung disease specialist (not only cancer), and he is also one of the most important leaders in lung cancer within the field of pulmonology, as both a writer of some very important work and as a great speaker.

A substantial revision of the staging system was presented at the World Conference on Lung Cancer in Korea this week. This project involved multiple lung cancer experts from all over the world and from a variety of specialties over the last several years, who reviewed the data on approximately 100,000 lung cancer cases, both NSCLC and SCLC. They looked at various ways to break down this large database of cases in order to provide a more accurate prognosis for patients.