[Clinical staging of bronchial carcinoma]

Histology and stage make it possible to predict statistical life expectancy in patients with bronchial carcinoma. These data serve to select the appropriate therapeutic modality which may influence an individual patient's life expectancy and quality. If the tumor is presumably resectable, a search for extrathoracic metastases is conducted by computed tomography and bone scan only if clinically suspected. If ct-scans reveal enlarged and therefore probably malignant mediastinal lymph nodes, curative resection is evaluated by mediastinoscopy. Correlations also exist between stage and spontaneous course as well as the probability of treatment-induced remission and life prolongation in small cell lung cancer.