[Malignant pleural mesothelioma: early diagnosis and multimodality management]

Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is a cancer with a poor prognosis, and its incidence increase, mainly as a result of exposure to asbestos. Universally acknowledged therapeutic approaches still don't exist at the moment, because of its refractory behaviour to all standard therapies; treatment protocols inclusive of either surgery, radiotherapy or chemotherapy have been largely employed, but usually with little impact on survival. For potentially operable pleural mesotheliomas new treatments tend to combine surgery both with new chemotherapy drugs and radiotherapy, in order to improve remarkably survival rates in selected cases. Other approaches, i.e. palliative, proved to be useful in the treatment of two major symptoms, namely dyspnea and thoracic pain. In this work the Authors are reporting their experience with malignant pleural mesothelioma, stressing the role of videothoracoscopy in the early diagnosis, weighing the radical cancer resection option and the effectiveness of multimodal treatment.