[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 a therapeutic modality which may influence an individual patient's life expectancy and quality. If the patient's tumor is presumably resectable, a search for extrathoracic metastases is conducted by computed tomography and bone scan only if clinically suspected. If CT reveals enlarged and therefore probably malignant mediastinal lymph nodes, curative tumor resection is evaluated by mediastinoscopy. There are also correlations between stage and spontaneous course, as well as the probability of treatment-induced remission and life-prolongation in small cell lung cancer.