For patients diagnosed with early-stage NSCLC referred for curative surgical management, disagreement between clinical and pathologic staging may be due to treatment delay and malignancy histopathological features. Clinically under-staging increases risk of morbidity and mortality, which could be addressed through improved timeliness of care. Concordance of clinical and pathologic staging should be a routinely assessed benchmark for all lung cancer MDTs.
Nolan et al. (2026) studied this question.