Prognosis of invasive squamous cell carcinoma of the uterine cervix: a comparative study of the predictive values of clinical staging IB--III and a histopathologic malignancy grading system.

The prognostic values of clinical staging IB--III and a histopathologic malignancy grading system have been compared in a retrospective study on 338 women with invasive squamous cell carcinoma of the uterine cervix. The superiority of the grading system to staging was significant (p less than 0.01). However, staging had an additional prognostic value. Using both the malignancy grading system and clinical staging together provided a better capacity to predict the clinical outcome in individual patients. Prognostication according to clinical staging alone will result in a considerable loss of information.