[Place of surgery in a multidisciplinary approach to stage III non-small-cell cancers]

Results of isolated surgical resection for stage III lung cancer are not satisfactory, since overall 5-year survival rates rarely exceed 15%. Deaths during follow-up are mainly due to metastatic progression. The multimodality approach adds chemotherapy to surgery, with the intent to improve the control of micrometastatic disease which potentially exists at the time of diagnosis. Preoperative or neoadjuvant chemotherapy is currently under evaluation. Phase 2 trials demonstrate a treatment-related mortality of 5%: complete response and partial response are rated 5-10% and 50% respectively. About 85% of patients are operated upon within an average of 3 months after onset of treatment. Exploratory thoracotomy without resection is performed in 15% of cases; a complete resection may be performed in 75% of cases. Overall post-operative mortality is close to 5%, but considerably higher rates of 10-17.5% have been reported following pneumonectomy. Median survival after treatment may reach 20 months. Indicators of improved survival are response to induction therapy and complete resection. However, ther is no objective evidence that induction therapy improves survival after resection. Interpretation of phase 2 trials is obscured by methodologic drawbacks such as heterogenous patient samples or inaccurate staging. The spare phase 3 trials suffer from identical drawbacks, and further from too short sample sizes. Mediastinoscopy prior to induction therapy is mandatory to confirm N2 or N3 disease, because radiologic staging is not reliable. Pathologic and therefore accurate staging is achieved when surgical resection is the initial step of treatment. Previous work has concluded that post-operative or adjuvant chemotherapy does not improve survival; however, these trials did not use optimal drug regimens, and compliance to treatment was not satisfactory. In fine, the 2 major objectives of surgery in the multimodality setting are to secure local control of the disease, and to confirm stage III disease owing to pathologic stating.