The National Emphysema Treatment Trial (NETT) has published many articles reporting the various outcomes of lung volume reduction surgery versus medical treatment for patients with severe emphysema. However, long and complex clinical trials like NETT that involve both medical and surgical issues generate multiple manuscripts over a period of years and report an array of various outcomes. As a result, the essential findings of the trial may appear to be fragmented to the clinician or clinical researcher or be lost among the many medical reports published each year. In this review, we summarize in one publication the major medical and surgical outcomes of NETT.