[Clinicopathologic assessment of primary thymic carcinoma based on eighteen cases]

In order to study clinicopathologic characteristics of thymic carcinomas, 18 patients with thymic carcinoma and 56 patients with invasive thymoma were reviewed. All of them were underwent thoracotomy. Both 5-year and 10-year survival rates were 44% in the thymic carcinoma patients, while 5-year survival and 10-year survival rates were respectively 62% and 52% in the invasive thymoma patients. The survival rate of the thymic carcinoma cases was significantly lower than that of invasive thymoma cases (p < 0.05). Both surgical technique and anticancer chemotherapy. However, have been improved in these years, such as artificial vessels for great veins, panpleuro-pneumonectomy, cisplatin and so on. Those new techniques have brought the significantly higher survival rate in recent 10 cases of thymic carcinoma patients. Three-year survival rate of 10 cases after 1990 was 80% and it was 13% in 8 cases before 1989 (p < 0.01). We conclude that surgical procedure are necessary for the treatment of thymic carcinoma patients, and both chemotherapy and radiotherapy should be combined with the surgical procedures to completely remove the tumors.