[Cytologic studies in relation to the effect of treatment of lung cancer]

Since the diagnosis of lung cancer is made cytologically in most instances, the study of cytologic materials of lung cancer may be useful to plan the treatment schedule, to judge the effect of treatment and to find the recurrence of the lesion in central type lung cancer. Shibata et al. observed the correlation of morphologic changes of irradiated cancer cells and radiation doses, and found the close relation between them. In order to detect disappearance of cancer cell in the cytologic specimens, more than over 1000 r. was necessary for small cell carcinoma, more than 2000 r. For large cell carcinoma, more than 3000 r. For squamous cell carcinoma and more than 5000 r for adenocarcinoma, respectively. It suggests that small cell carcinoma is more radiosensitive. To predict the degree of response to radiotherapy, it is most important to decide the cell typing of obtained cancer cells. We investigated whether certain cytologic characteristics of small cell carcinoma could be correlated with response to chemotherapy. The cancer cells in the good response group more frequently showed finely granular chromatin evenly distributed through the nuclei. The cancer cells in the no/response group predominantly showed deeply stained nuclei with coarsely granular chromatin distributed evenly or pale nuclei with unevenly distributed chromatin. These findings may be an indicator to predict the degree of response to chemotherapy. Cytologic grading of irradiatic changes reported by Shibata et al. may be useful for judging the effect of treatment of lung cancer. We introduce three cases of lung cancer in this paper and reported the correlation of morphologic changes of cancer cells and the effect of treatment of those cases.