Adjuvant Chemotherapy Improves Survival in Surgically Resected Stage IB Squamous Lung Cancer

At present there is a significant lack of clinical data for patients with surgically resected stage I squamous lung cancer. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of postoperative chemotherapy in this specific population.

We retrospectively identified patients who had undergone complete squamous lung cancer resection at the Shanghai Chest Hospital between January 2008 and January 2014.

A total of 596 patients (236 stage IA, 360 stage IB) were included in this study. Results demonstrated that adjuvant chemotherapy (ACT) could provide longer overall survival for patients with p-stage IB disease (hazard ratio [HR], 0.56; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.34-0.90; p = 0.017). Among p-stage IB patients the ACT-treated cohort trended toward a benefit (HR, 0.69; 95% CI, 0.45-1.04) in recurrence-free survival but failed to reach statistical significance (p = 0.076). After propensity score matching the HRs of recurrence-free survival and overall survival were 0.58 (95% CI, 0.35-0.96; p = 0.033) and 0.49 (95% CI, 0.27-0.88; p = 0.017), respectively. With regards to patients with p-stage IA disease, neither overall survival (HR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.34-2.27; p = 0.783) nor recurrence-free survival (HR, 0.79; 95% CI, 0.38-1.65; p = 0.534) was significantly different when compared between patients receiving ACT and those who did not. Similar results were also achieved after propensity score matching.

The data presented herein demonstrated that ACT might provide survival benefits for squamous lung cancer patients with p-stage IB disease.