The prognostic influence of tumour budding in Western patients with stage II colorectal cancer.

Background: Tumour budding (TB) refers to loss of tumour cohesiveness and is defined as isolated cells or a cell cluster of up to four tumour cells at the microscopic analysis. The International Tumour Budding Consensus Conference (ITBCC) in 2016 proposed a scoring system to standardise the pathology evaluation of TB in colorectal cancer (CRC) as high (H), intermediate (I) and low (L) TB.

Objective: To evaluate the recurrence-free survival (RFS) of stage II CRC patients as per the ITBCC 2016 classification and associations between TB and clinical pathological features.