[Surgical treatment and outcome of multiple primary lung cancers]

We assessed the selection of the type of pulmonary resection, operative morbidity, mortality and the outcome of our 14 cases who underwent surgical treatment for multiple primary lung cancer. Eleven cases underwent lobectomy with limited surgery, 3 cases underwent combination of limited surgery. Only 1 case had prolonged air leakage after surgery, but other cases had no postoperative complication and there was no operative death. The survival rate was higher than that of T4 (metastasis to the same lung lobe) cases and M1 (metastasis to another lung lobes) cases. With this result, we consider that postoperative good survival can be expected by the aggressive surgical approach for cases of multiple primary lung cancer, despite it is difficult to distinguish multiple primary lung cancers and metastatic cancers preoperatively. On the other hand, the opportunity to treat early-stage lung cancer is possibly increase with the spread of medical checkup using computed tomography (CT), it will be necessary to introduce limited surgery at 1st operation to keep post-operative pulmonary function, considering another surgery for the 2nd primary lung cancer.