Survival of patients with lung cancer, Yazd, Iran

Lung carcinoma is the leading cause of cancer mortality worldwide. Although the 5-year survival rate nearly tripled from 5-15% over the last 25 years, the estimated number of deaths still exceeds 1.3 million annually. The overall 5-year survival of lung cancer is only 10% in Europe and 15% in the United States. The aim of the current study was to determine the long-term survival and the effect of certain prognostic factors on survival of patients with lung cancer in Yazd city, Iran.

In this cross-sectional descriptive study, we retrospectively reviewed hospital records and follow-up data of 148 patients with histological proven lung cancer using the cancer data registered between 1998 and 2005 in the pathology department of Shahid Sadoughi educational hospital, Yazd, Iran. Data were extracted from patient documents that included sex, age, clinical manifestations, histopathological report of the tumor and type of treatment given.

Overall survival time in all patients was 8.5 months after diagnosis and there was no significant difference in survival according to sex (p=0.958). Histological analysis revealed that squamous cell carcinoma was the most common histologic type (35%). Kaplan-Meier statistical methods estimated the average survival time for SCC to be better (22.6 months) in comparison with the other types of histology (all of them below 10 months). There was a trend towards significance between type of histology and duration of survival (p=0.08).

It is reasonable to expect that early lung cancer detection, and appropriated treatment, may improve surgical morbidity and mortality. Low survival of lung cancer in our center patients show our shortages in screening programs for early diagnosis. Designing studies with larger sample size that take some other variables like staging of patients is now necessary.