The staging of soft-tissue sarcomas.

We have assessed the ability of the American Joint Committee System, the Hajdu and the Surgical Staging System to separate different prognostic groups of patients with soft-tissue sarcoma. There were 122 patients with nonmetastatic tumours of the locomotor system. All were operated on with a wide, or radical, surgical margin. None of the staging systems could identify more than two groups with significantly different overall survival. A plea is made for the use of statistical multivariate analysis of prognostic factors when constructing staging systems for soft-tissue sarcoma.