Transbronchial fine needle aspiration cytological examination: a useful tool for diagnosing primary lung cancer

Obtaining a definitive preoperative diagnosis plays a critical role in deciding upon the treatment approach for lung carcinoma. However, success in making definitive diagnoses of small primary lung cancers will require new approaches because these cancers are difficult to detect using standard biopsy procedures.

We evaluated the results of morphologic definitive diagnosis together with various clinical factors in 1003 primary lung cancers resected surgically. Patients underwent transbronchial brushing, fine needle aspiration cytology, forceps biopsy, and/or forceps biopsy-stamp cytology for preoperative diagnoses, in conjunction with the use of Diff-Quik to confirm that hits had been made on the radiographic shadows before terminating the examinations.

Sensitivities of the diagnostic procedures for primary lung cancers were as follows: 64.8% for brushing, 56.1% for transbronchial forceps biopsy, 72.0% for transbronchial forceps biopsy-stamp cytology, and 86.4% for transbronchial fine needle aspiration. The four transbronchial biopsy procedures had a combined overall sensitivity of 92.7%. In patients with peripheral lung cancers of 2 cm or less in diameter, transbronchial fine needle aspiration had a sensitivity of 75.9%, which was the highest sensitivity for all transbronchial examinations. In the subset of 296 patients who underwent all four transbronchial biopsy examinations, transbronchial fine needle aspiration had the highest sensitivity of preoperative diagnosis of all the transbronchial examination methods.

The sensitivity of preoperative cytological diagnosis for primary lung cancers, especially transbronchial aspiration cytology, is high. Transbronchial fine needle aspiration cytology is useful for the preoperative diagnosis of primary lung cancer.