Quality of life after lung resection for lung cancer

Radical and palliative treatments for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) have been reported to have a significant impact on the patient quality of life (QoL). The increasing improvements in lung cancer diagnosis and cures in recent years have changed the perspectives of quantity and quality of the life after cancer in these patients. However, despite a growing interest about patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) in surgical oncology, we are quite distant from a routine collection of QoL data after pulmonary resection for NSCLC. The presence of this gap is due to several reasons: the lack of validated surgical-specific questionnaires, the inappropriate consideration of traditional objective parameters as surrogates of QoL outcomes and the difficulties in dealing with missing items in this type of research. However, a recent the European Society of Thoracic Surgeons (ESTS) survey exploring the use of QoL data in our field has revealed that almost half of the units responding to the questionnaire collect QoL informations from their patients. Increased consensus and collaboration between surgeons are needed to include routinely PROMs in randomized controlled trials. The objective of this paper is to review the best available evidence published in the literature and regarding QoL after lung resection for cancer, aiming at identifying topics deserving further investigations.