[Mortality in operable lung cancer]

We have retrospectively examined the medical records and prospectively studied the survival of the 50 men and 26 women who underwent surgery for primary non-small cell lung cancer at our hospital during the period 1982 to 1986. Adenocarcinoma was the predominant histologic type of tumour (55%). Pneumonectomy was performed in only 17% of the cases. Surgery was considered to be radical in 54 patients. This was not dependent on sex, histology or type of resection. 60% of the patients were alive after three years. Almost all of them had undergone radical resection. The surviving patients (at follow-up 1 July, 1990) had been younger at the time of surgery and had a lower erythrocyte sedimentation rate than those who had died. As a group, however, they had not lived longer than those who died.