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Updated: May 30, 2026
Thoracoscopic Extended Right Middle Plus Lower Sleeve Lobectomy for Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer
Published on: February 27, 2026
Sublobectomy versus lobectomy for stage I non-small-cell lung cancer, a meta-analysis of published studies
Jiang Fan1, Lei Wang, Ge-Ning Jiang
1Department of Thoracic Surgery, Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital, Tongji University School of Medicine, Shanghai, People's Republic of China.
Background:
The selection of surgeries for patients with stage I NSCLC remains controversial. We evaluated the effectiveness of different surgeries for stage I NSCLC through a meta-analysis of studies that compared sublobectomy with lobectomy.
Methods:
The overall survival/cancer-specific survival (OS/CSS) of stage I NSCLC after sublobectomy or lobectomy was compared. The log (hazard ratio) [ln (HR)] and its standard error (SE) were used as the outcome measure for data combining.
Results:
There were 24 eligible studies, published from 1990 to 2010, enrolled (11,360 patients). Compared with sublobectomy, there was a significant benefit of lobectomy on OS and CSS of stage I NSCLC patients (HR 1.40; 95% confidence interval [95% CI], 1.15-1.69; P = .0006). In stage Ia patients with tumor no large than 2 cm, there were no differences in OS between lobectomy and sublobectomy (HR 0.81; 95% CI, 0.39-1.71; P = .58). For the comparison between lobectomy and segmentectomy, there was no significant difference on OS (HR = 1.09; 95% CI, 0.85-1.40; P = .45) and CSS (HR 0.99; 95% CI, 0.72-1.38; P = .97) in stage I NSCLC patients. There was no significant publication bias detected in any sections of the analysis.
Conclusions:
For stage I patients, sublobectomy causes lower survival than lobectomy, whereas the outcomes of segmentectomy are comparable to that of lobectomy; for stage Ia patients with tumor ≤2 cm, sublobectomy produces similar survival to lobectomy.
