Should surgery be performed for early stage lung cancer

A 53-year-old male patient was diagnosed with early-stage lung cancer. He had no chest pain, but occasionally coughed. There was a cavity in his left lung, and he felt a blockage when eating. Does he need surgery?

In the treatment of lung cancer, in the early stages without metastasis, surgical treatment should be the main approach or efforts should be made to treat the disease, with combined treatment of radiotherapy, chemotherapy and immunotherapy added as appropriate depending on the stage and pathological tissue type.

The surgical resection rate of lung cancer is 60% to 90%, the surgical mortality rate is less than 2%, and the 5-year survival rate is 20% to 40%. The 5-year survival rate of complete resection is 48%.

Statistics show that among the patients diagnosed, less than 20% of the cases can be surgically removed. In terms of staging, patients in stage I and II are mostly considered for surgical treatment; about 30% of patients in stage III can be surgically treated; and patients in stage IV can mostly only be treated with chemotherapy or radiotherapy, but 50% of the cases are already in stage IV at the time of diagnosis. Therefore, only about 15-20% of lung cancer patients actually undergo surgical treatment.

Lobectomy plus lymph node removal is the best surgical method for lung cancer. If the patient has poor lung function, is too old, or has other serious medical diseases, local resection is another option. But no matter what, this is a big operation, it takes several weeks to recover, and the process will be quite painful, so patients and their families need to consider it carefully.