[Bronchial carcinoid. A clinical study of 37 patients]

To establish whether bronchoplastic procedures designed to minimize loss of lung tissue are justifiable for the treatment of bronchial carcinoid tumours, data were analysed from 37 patients (17 men, 20 women, average age 51 [22-70] years) who had undergone surgery for typical (n = 30) or atypical (n = 7) bronchial carcinoids. Conventional tumour resections had been performed in 29 cases and bronchoplastic operations in eight. After an average observation period of 54 months one patient who had undergone lobectomy for a bronchial carcinoid had died of recurrent tumour, and one other patient who had been treated by pneumonectomy for an atypical carcinoid had developed distant metastases. All the other patients were free from tumour at that time. This indicates that patients treated by bronchoplastic procedures do not have any higher incidence of recurrences or any lower chance of survival than those treated by lobectomy or pneumonectomy. A bronchoplastic operation should therefore be the treatment of first choice, provided that the adjacent lung tissue has not been destroyed by retention pneumonia and that lymph node dissection does not reveal any involvement.