Functional and non-functional pancreatic neuroendocrine tumours: ENETS or AJCC TNM staging system?

Background: There are currently 2 Tumour-Node-Metastasis (TNM) staging systems for pancreatic neuroendocrine tumours (p-NETs) - European Neuroendocrine Tumour Society (ENETS) and American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC). P-NETs being heterogeneous, we investigated the prognostic value of the 2 systems in p-NETs, as a whole, and more interestingly in functional and non-functional sub-groups separately, with a view to ascertaining any potential clinical benefits of using one system over the other.

Methods: Data from patients with surgically resected p-NETs were retrospectively reviewed. Kaplan-Meier method and Cox Regression proportional hazards model were used to analyse overall survival (OS) and prognostic predictors respectively.

Results: In the whole group of 165 patients, both TNM systems successfully discriminated OS differences when comparing stages I and II with stages III and IV (<0.05); ENETS stage III patients had a significantly better OS than those in stage IV (=0.003). Patients with functional p-NETs in ENETS stage II showed a statistically better OS than those in stages III and IV (<0.05). For non-functional tumours, the AJCC staging system could effectively discriminate between the OS differences of patients in stage I with stages III and IV, or stage II with III and IV (<0.05). Along with surgical intent and World Health Organisation (WHO) 2010 grade, both ENETS and AJCC staging systems were effective predictors of OS for different function-status p-NETs.

Conclusions: The ENETS system might have potential advantages when applied to all p-NETs and to the functional sub-group, while the AJCC system might be clinically more practical for non-functional p-NETs.