Patients 65 years and older who receive surgery for lung cancer are living longer, claims a recent study.
According to national records, lung cancer most commonly occurs in older adults, with the median age at diagnosis being 70 years. Moreover, only about 17% of patients with the disease go on to live 5 years after presenting with the condition. Therefore, researchers wondered whether the survival benefit for older adults was worth the potential risks associated with undergoing surgery.
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For the study, researchers looked at lung cancer operations reported in the General Thoracic Surgery Database from 2002 through 2012 and linked them to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) data for patients 65 years and older using common variables in both databases. Led by Felix G Fernandez, MD, MS, Emory University (Atlanta, GA), they then used statistical analyses methods to estimate long-term survival for patients based on tumor stage. They published their results in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery.
In total, surgical data was available for over 60,000 patients with lung cancer, 26,055 of whom were 65 years or older at initial diagnosis. The median survival of patients with stage I disease was 6.7 years after surgery, almost 2 years longer than the 5-year goal typically targeted by most health care professionals. However, in patients with more advanced disease, survival was 3.5 years for stage II, 2.4 years for stage III, and 2.2 years for stage IV.
Therefore, researchers concluded that surgery offers a long-term survival benefit to patients 65 years and older with lung cancer, although more so for patients with stage I disease.
“This research effort is important because it will assist in recommending effective, optimal treatments tailored specifically to older patients with lung cancer,” Dr Fernandez said in a news bulletin released alongside the article. “And it is available during a time when we expect to be seeing more of these patients.”
