The prognostic role of metastatic lymph node ratio in colon cancer: a retrospective cohort study on 241 patients in a single center

The detection of nodal status is based on examination of lymph nodes (LN) after the tumor surgical resection and the current guidelines recommend to examine atleast 12 regional LN. An inadequate number of examined LN may lead to a lower N stage or to a false-negative nodal disease. To overcome these issues, many authors proposed to consider the metastatic lymph node ratio (mLNR). MLNR is the ratio of the number of metastatic LN to the number of examined LN