What is the recommended treatment for people with early-stage lung cancer?
We used to think that they only needed surgery. However, it turns out that even some patients with stage I lung cancer can have the cancer come back several years after the operation. So, presumably, in those cases, the cancer cells have escaped outside the tumor before the operation. What we’ve learned recently is that certain people are more likely to be cured with chemotherapy after surgery than surgery alone. At the 2004 American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting, there were two very large studies presented that definitely showed that adjuvant (post-surgery) chemotherapy is helpful for certain patients with stage I cancer. Stage I is usually broken up into two groups, Ia and Ib. Stage Ia is very small tumors and Ib is larger tumors. We haven’t studied chemotherapy in the very small tumors yet, but for the Ib tumors, new data suggested adjuvant chemotherapy’s helpful. This data also supports using adjuvant chemotherapy for stage II. These two studies specifically reported
