# 8th Edition of the AJCC Cancer Staging Manual: Pancreas and Hepatobiliary Cancers

Source: https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-chun-ajcc-8th-edition-hepatobiliary-aso-2018/  
OnCo record `paper-chun-ajcc-8th-edition-hepatobiliary-aso-2018` (Key paper). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

The editorial announcing the 2017 staging changes for pancreas, liver and biliary cancers, including the split of muscle-invading gallbladder cancer into a free-side and a liver-side category.

## Summary

Editorial in Annals of Surgical Oncology by AJCC hepatobiliary panel members introducing the eighth edition changes. Europe PMC indexes no abstract for this article, so OnCo carries no figures from it. For gallbladder cancer the edition subdivided T2 into T2a (peritoneal side) and T2b (hepatic side), following the Shindoh 2015 multicentre study, and reclassified N stage by the number of positive nodes rather than their location (as the validation study linked here describes).

## Fields

- Kind: Key paper
- Last checked: 2026-09-24
- Tags: gallbladder-evidence
- Journal: Annals of Surgical Oncology
- Year: 2018
- DOI: 10.1245/s10434-017-6025-x
- Authors: Chun YS, Pawlik TM, Vauthey JN.
- Findings: No abstract is indexed on Europe PMC; the T2a/T2b subdivision is documented in the validation and meta-analysis papers linked from this record.
- What it means: The staging change UK pathology reports now carry. Validation against the US National Cancer Database (Giannis 2021) found the eighth edition no better than the seventh at predicting survival overall.
- Caveats: Editorial without indexed abstract.; The N-stage change did not improve prognostic performance in validation.

## Sources

- Ann Surg Oncol 2018: https://doi.org/10.1245/s10434-017-6025-x
- PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28752469/

## Connected records

- key papers: [Tumor location is a strong predictor of tumor progression and survival in T2 gallbladder cancer: an international multicenter study](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-shindoh-t2-gallbladder-cancer-tumour-location-ann-surg-2015/), [Validation of the 8th Edition American Joint Commission on Cancer (AJCC) Gallbladder Cancer Staging System: Prognostic Discrimination and Identification of Key Predictive Factors](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-giannis-ajcc8-gallbladder-staging-validation-cancers-2021/)
- cancers: [Gallbladder cancer](https://onco.cc/cancers/gallbladder/)
- terms: [T2a versus T2b gallbladder cancer (peritoneal side versus hepatic side)](https://onco.cc/terms/t2a-versus-t2b/), [TNM staging](https://onco.cc/terms/tnm-staging/)
- journals: [Annals of surgical oncology](https://onco.cc/journals/annals-of-surgical-oncology/)
- roadmaps: [Gallbladder cancer roadmap: from a chance finding at gallstone surgery to a disease with its own trials](https://onco.cc/roadmaps/gallbladder-cancer-roadmap/)

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