The ENCR Steering Committee endorses and encourages the active Use of the published Toronto Childhood Cancer Stage Guidelines by Cancer Registries.
Tumour-specific staging systems have been developed over many years. However, for many childhood cancers, more than one system is in use for the same cancer, TNM is sometimes inadequate or even not existing for documenting extent of disease at diagnosis.
Consensus guidelines for use by population cancer registries for staging childhood cancers (the Toronto Paediatric Cancer Stage Guidelines) have been developed. The Guidelines recommend the malignancy-specific staging system most suitable for use by population based cancer registries for 16 childhood malignancies.
The ENCR steering committee wants to endorse and encourage the active use of the published Toronto Childhood Cancer Stage Guidelines in order to promote European and international consistency for those registries who wish to collect stage for childhood malignancies. The Steering Committee will also evaluate how to introduce these data items (data variables) in the future call for data.
The Guidelines and the consensus process by which they were developed are published in The Lancet Oncology 2016;17:e163-72. Feasibility, validity and staging rules are published in The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health 2018; 2(3):173-179. Staging rules are available in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish. A summary of the Guidelines is published in TNM Classification of Malignant Tumours, 8th edition (2017).