The Long-term Prognosis in Patients with Resected Stage IA Non-small-cell Lung Cancer

Abstract

━━ In recent years, long-term prognostic observations of five years or more for early-stage lung cancer have revealed that deaths from other diseases (secondary cancer deaths+non-cancer deaths) account for a considerable proportion of all deaths. In the era of medical advances, achieving a survival of five years after surgery is not the only goal for early-stage lung cancer, for which a good long-term prognosis can be expected. In the future, details of other disease deaths, i.e. what kind of cancer the patients suffered from and what kind of treatment they received in cases of death due to secondary cancers, or what kind of disease led to death due to non-cancer disease, should be confirmed over a much longer period of time than before. Given the above, we thoracic oncologists should evaluate how surgery, adjuvant chemotherapy, or adjuvant radiotherapy affect the long-term events (more than five years after treatment) and re-consider and improve our current treatment strategy prop-erly. ( JJLC. 2022;62:971-974)