[The correlation between the distant metastases and organ-specific symptoms in the patients with lung cancer]

In this study, the correlation between distant metastases and metastatic organ-specific abnormalities in patients with lung cancer was evaluated. There were 197 patients who have lung cancer with distant metastases in this study. 141 (71.5%) of them were nonsmall cell lung cancer and 56 (28.5%) of them were small cell lung cancer. While one site of liver, brain and bone metastases were detected in 128 (64.9%) patients, remainders (69 patients, 35.1%) had surrenal, renal, pancreatic, skin, lung, thyroid, abdominal lymph node metastases. Organ-specific symptoms, findings on physical examination and abnormalities in laboratory data were detected in 121 (56.5%), 45 (21%) and 52 (24.2 %) patients, respectively. Sensitivity of predilection of organ-specific symptoms for bone, liver and brain metastases were 67%, 43% and 74% and specificity were 86%, 90% and 76%, respectively. We concluded that organ-specific abnormalities were not so effective to predict metastases in lung cancer. We considered that this result could be due to retrospective analysis and not included enough patients.