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. 2026 Mar 28;40(8):893–902. doi: 10.1007/s12149-026-02198-w

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© The Author(s) 2026

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 5 — Survival Impact of Downstaging from IIIA to IIB in TNM 9. The top panel displays stage migration between TNM 8 and TNM 9, highlighting cases that were down-staged from IIIA to IIB. The bottom panel presents Kaplan-Meier survival curves comparing OS for patients whose stage remained unchanged in IIB versus those down-staged from IIIA to IIB. Stage IIB (left graph): Patients down-staged from IIIA to IIB had a lower OS compared to patients whose stage remained unchanged in IIB, and this difference was statistically significant (p = 0.029). The 5-year OS was 50% down-staged group and 61% was unchanged group. Stage IIIA (right graph): Survival between down-staged and an unchanged cases was similar with no significant difference (p = 0.23). The 5-year OS was 50% down-staged group and 46% was unchanged group