Retrospective study on surgery and post-operative adjuvant treatment in stage IIIa non-small cell lung cancer

[Objective] To retrospectively analyze and compare the impacts on stage IIIa NSCLC patients′ survival time of non-surgical, single surgical treatment, and post-operative adjuvant treatment, and to simplistically analyze factors that may impact the prognosis of stage IIIa NSCLC. [Methods] Following relevant criteria, 87 stage IIIa NSCLC patients were selected from 856 patients who received in-patient treatments at the Department of Thoracic Surgery of the Peking University First Hospital from 1/1/1997 to 12/31/2004. Then patients′ post-operative treatment information, survival time, and quality of living from 50 patients were available and the percentage of availability was 57.48%. For these patients, Post-operative 1, 3, and 5 year-survival rates were summarized by using SPSS (version 10.0); Patients who received surgery were further classified into those who received just surgery and those who also received post-operative adjuvant treatment which were differentiated by the Kaplan-Meier approach; The survival curves of the only-surgery and non-surgical group were also compared. [Results] The 1, 3, 5-year survival rates of the selected patients were 80.49%,34.62%, and 29.67%; Statistically significant result was not obtained from the comparison between the survival curves of the only-surgery and post-operative adjuvant treatment group (P =0.0722) while the small p-value may indicate higher survival rates of patients who received post-operative adjuvant treatment; Patients who received single surgery treatment had higher survival rates than those who didn′t receive surgery and the different is statistically significant (P =0.0073). [Conclusions] Surgery is the basic treatment for stage IIIa NSCLC which could be surgically removed; It′s likely that post-operative adjuvant treatment could increase the survival rates of patients with surgically removable stage IIIa NSCLC.