Original articleGeneral thoracicResected Synchronous Primary Malignant Lung Tumors: A Population-Based Study
Section snippets
Material and Methods
All patients resected for primary lung cancer in Norway since 1993 were identified in a comprehensive database at the Cancer Registry of Norway. Patients with more than one physically distinct tumor, separated from the index tumor by normal lung tissue, in the same or different lobe or lung, were classified as having synchronous primary tumors. The tumors had to be diagnosed during the course of initial surgical treatment, preoperatively, peroperatively, or postoperatively in the period 1993 to
Results
During the investigation period (1993 to 2000), 94 patients (40 women), with a mean age of 64 years (range, 41 to 83 years; Table 1), were found to have malignant synchronous tumors, representing 3.7% of all resections for lung cancer in Norway. Sixty-seven patients had two malignant tumors, and the remaining 27 had three or more. The tumors were confined to one lung in 90 cases, one lobe in 48, and multiple lobes in 46. In 73 patients, at least one tumor was located in an upper lobe.
Comment
The most important finding in this series is that surgical treatment in patients with synchronous primary lung tumors might be performed with an acceptable survival rate in an unselected, population-based cohort. Few patients were diagnosed with synchronous tumors preoperatively, but the situation may have changed with improved CT investigations preoperatively.
The strength of our study is the availability of a uniform database within a national cancer registry and the ability to track the
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2016, Journal of Thoracic OncologyCitation Excerpt :Discordance in ALK rearrangements between primary tumors and metastases has also been reported.43 Most second primary lung cancers are consistently reported as being of the same major histotype (e.g., 2 adenocarcinomas, or 2 squamous cell carcinomas).9,44–66 Generally good outcomes are observed, suggesting that the assessment as two separate primary cancers was correct.