Comparison study of clinicoradiological profile of primary lung cancer cases: an Eastern India experience

According to the first population-based cancer registry from eastern part of India, Kolkata and its surrounding areas have the highest prevalence of lung cancer in India. However, there is very limited data from this part of the country.

The aim of this study is to find out the demographic and clinicoradiological profile of primary bronchogenic carcinoma.

This is a retrospective review of lung cancer cases diagnosed in two tertiary institutes of Kolkata over a period of 4 years.

We have reviewed the cases with proven histological or cytological diagnosis of primary bronchogenic carcinoma and chi-square test is done to calculate statistical significance.

Out of 607 patients, male 489 and female 118, 67.7% are from rural area, 67.2% are smoker and only 9.4% are ≤40 years of age. Smoking is the major risk factor for primary lung cancer (P = 0.000) but no significance could be established with the different histological subtypes (P = 0.207). Though squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) is the most predominant variety (35.1%), adenocarcinoma and undifferentiated type are overrepresented in ≤40 years. SCC occurs at a significantly higher age group (60.84 ± 12.16 years) than other subtypes (P = 0.000). At least 55.2% cases of nonsmall cell lung cancer and 54% of small cell lung cancer presented in very advanced stage.

SCC is the most common histological subtype of primary bronchogenic carcinoma. The relatively increased frequency of adenocarcinoma in our study as compared to other studies from India is probably due to higher proportion of nonsmokers.