Outcome of patients with lung cancer detected incidentally

Lung cancers in the early stages are sometimes detected incidentally. The aim of this study is to evaluate the outcome of patients with lung cancer detected incidentally and to compare to those in whom the malignancy was detected by symptoms. Untreated patients with lung cancer, who were admitted to our division over a 28-year period up to 2003, were analyzed with reference to their reasons for detection of the cancer. During the period, 1168 patients were diagnosed, and 173 (14.8%) of them were detected incidentally. As lung cancers detected incidentally were more often at operable stage (stage IA-IIIA) (p=0.0001), surgical treatment was chosen more frequently in the incidentally diagnosed group (p=0.0001). The outcome with lung cancer patients detected incidentally was more favorable than that of the patients detected by the symptoms (multivariate analysis, p=0.0001). The incidental detection of lung cancer contributes to improvement of the outcome. This study demonstrated a careful review of chest radiography obtained at routine or preoperative examination is important especially for the high-risk patients such as elderly and those with smoking history.