In recent years, oncologists have debated whether patients with a certain type of advanced lung cancer would benefit from surgery.
Now a major study published in the journal The Lancet has found that surgery after standard chemotherapy and radiation can be an option for patients. Surgery significantly prolongs survival without progression of the lung cancer, but does not dramatically improve overall survival compared to a control group treated with conventional chemotherapy and radiation alone.
The patients who did appear to have a major benefit from surgery were those in whom a section of the lung (lobe) was removed, rather than the entire lung, lead author Dr. Kathy Albain and colleagues reported. Albain is a lung and breast cancer specialist at Loyola University Health System's Cardinal Bernardin Cancer Center.
"This the first study conducted in this group of patients where the only difference in the two groups of patients was the use of surgery," Albain said.
In an accompanying editorial, German researcher Dr. Wilfried Eberhardt and colleagues wrote that as a result of the new study, "We now have clear arguments in favor of surgery in well-selected patient subsets."
The study included patients with non-small cell cancer, which accounts for about 80 percent of all lung cancers. Patients had stage 3 cancer, in which the cancer had spread to lymph nodes in the center of the chest. This type of stage 3 cancer accounts for about 30 percent of all non-small cell lung cancer cases. Patients were treated at multiple academic and community hospitals in the United States and Canada.