Lung cancer surgery e ective even on high-risk patients

Emory cardiothoracic surgeon Manu Sancheti wanted to test the notion that patients considered high-risk with early stage lung cancer should be treated only with nonsurgical therapies. So he compared clinical outcomes of high-risk patients with those of standard-risk patients a er lung cancer surgery. e study, which ran in the Annals of oracic Surgery, concluded that surgical lung resection can be a safe and e ective treatment even for high-risk patients with early stage lung cancer. Previous research suggested that high-risk patients—60 and older, long-term smokers, with other health problems—were more likely to have complications or die a er lung surgery. is led to one in ve patients with stage I non-small-cell lung cancer being deemed inoperable or high-risk for surgery.

Using Emory data from the Gen- eral oracic Surgery Database of the Society of oracic Surgeons, the team identi ed 310 standard-risk and 180 high-risk tients who underwent surgical resection for early stage lung cancer at Emory from 2009 to 2013.

While average length of hospital stay was one day longer for highrisk patients ( ve days) compared with standard-risk patients (four days), there was little di erence between the two groups in post-operative mortality

(2 percent for high-risk; 1 percent for standard-risk).

Researchers also found spread of cancer lymph nodes was discovered during surgery in about 20 percent of the high-risk patients— something that would not have been detected and treated with a non-surgical approach. three years post-surgery, 59 percent of high-risk and 76 percent of standard-risk patients were still alive. ■