Yang ZL, et al. – Researchers evaluated the prognostic value of the number of lymph nodes examined (eLNs) in patients with node-negative gastric cancer (GC), and further adjusted the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) 8th staging system based on the number of eLNs. They included node-negative GC patients diagnosed 1988–2015 from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database. The primary cohort of 4,159 node-negative GC patients formed the base to build the adjusted AJCC 8th staging system, which was then internally validated by a bootstrap method, and externally validated with an independent cohort of 5,565 node-negative GC patients. Observations suggested that the adjusted AJCC 8th staging system based on the number of eLNs predicted survival more accurately and discriminatively for node-negative GC patients in the United States.