Combined Therapy: Irradiation and Surgery in Treatment of Bronchogenic Carcinoma

Abstract

Today a variety of therapeutic modalities are available for the treatment of lung cancer. With the intention of contributing towards the improved prognosis of the disease the present study was undertaken to clarify the effects of combined surgical and irradiation therapy in terms of histological type, surgical stage, surgical procedure and type of radiotherapy, thereby providing information on which to base the establishment of therapeutic regimens.
Combined irradiation and surgical therapy was observed to be effective in stage II and III cases of squamous cell carcinoma and in stage III cases of adenocarcinoma, thereby demonstrating the value of this technique in non-curative resection cases.
In particular, the positive effectiveness of preoperative irradiation inadvanced cases involving adjacent organs (T₃) and in cases of metastasis to mediastinal lymphnodes (n₃) was demonstrated to be statistically significant.
Although the number of intraoperative irradiation cases is to small to permit any firm conclusions, results do suggest the possibility that this might be a profitable method in cases of non-curative resection of adenocarcinoma, which otherwise tends to be more resistant to radiation therapy.