J.Jpn. Surg. Soc.. 79(8): 818-822, 1978

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Report on the annual meeting

PROBLEMS OF LUNG SURGERY SURGICAL THERAPY AND COMBINED TREATMENT

Up to December, 1976, the number of patients with lung cancer in whom resectional therapy was performed in our facility amounted to 575. Of these, the most of the cases (548) received various combined treatments with the exception of the remaining 27 who died within a month.
Statistics were made separately on patients before and after 1973, since in that year, we established our treatment policy: (1) surgical resection for all operable cases, whenever the pulmonary reserve is within the functional safety limit, (2) complete excision of all possible regional nodes and lymphatics, and (3) application of a uniform chemotherapeutic regimen as far as possible.
Comparative study between various Stage patients in the non-chemotherapy group showed that prognoses for Stage I, II, III cases after 1973 were superior to those for the corresponding Stage cases before 1973. The same was true for the chemotherapy group. It was also found that chemotherapy achieved a good result even in view of p-factor and n-factor.
In the hope of determining the sensitivity of tumor cells in question to a variety of antitumor agents and of thereby making chemotherapy more effective, we are developing a sensitivity test, i.e., short-term selective cultivation on a microplate of lung cancer cells obtained from a resected specimen. It was found that sensitivity differs greatly in spite of similar histologic appearance.
Efforts are being made with the hope that a chemotherapeutic agent, if properly selected for a given patient, can improve the distant survival rate.

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