The Importance of Histo-pathological Factors in Setting the Long Term Prognosis for Non-small Cell Lung Cancer

Introduction: In the last decades, the rate of pulmonary cancer has risen alarmingly. Pulmonary cancer represents the main cause of death in women and men in the United States of America, 100,000 new cases being registered annually in men and 50,000 new cases in women. The purpose of our study is to evaluate the importance of histo-pathological factors in the long term outcome of patients operated for lung cancer.
Material and methods: In order to write the present paper, we carried out a retrospective observational study on a period of 6 years. We used the casuistry of the Surgical Clinic I of the County Emergency Clinical Hospital Tîrgu Mureș. We studied all the patients’ papers who were admitted to Surgical Clinic I from the 1st of January 2005 till 31 December 2010. Further, we based our research on 197 patients that were admitted to Surgical Clinic I for bronchopulmonary tumors.
Results: We studied the importance of the T descriptor (tumor) from the TNM staging for establishing the long term prognosis. The value of p was 0.1676 so we didn’t obtain any value of statistical importance. We also took into consideration the value of N from the TNM staging as a prediction factor for long term survival in patients who underwent surgical intervention for pulmonary cancer. The p parameter was 0.0152 so we can say that we obtained a direct connection between the stages of lymph nodes metastasis and long term survival rate.
Conclusions: Long time survival rate of the patients depends on the histological type of the tumor. Long term survival prediction rate is better if the patients are over 60 years, compared with patients under 60 years. The N descriptor can be considered an important prediction factor, while the T descriptor’s value is useless. The existence of N’s descriptor in more stages of the TNM classification shows its limits and encourages for further improvements.