I had described earlier this week (prior post here) how the long-term follow up of one of the more important adjuvant chemotherapy trials for early stage resected NSCLC patients showed that there may be long-term adverse effects of chemotherapy. My last post also suggested that the benefit of pre-operative chemotherapy in another trial appeared to be limited to the patients with stage IIB and IIIA disease and wasn’t present for stage IB and IIA patients.

In my last post I described the results of the ChEST trial that showed a borderline statistically significant improvement in survival of patients who received cisplatin/gemcitabine chemotherapy for stage IB to IIIA NSCLC prior to surgery. This study was very similar to another neoadjuvant chemotherapy trial, known as SWOG 9900, which also randomized patients to upfront surgery or 3 cycles of pre-operative chemotherapy followed by surgery.

In contrast with post-operative chemotherapy, which has become a standard treatment approach to reduce the probability of recurrence of resected stage II and IIIA NSCLC (still pretty controversial for stage IB), pre-operative chemotherapy (also known as neoadjuvant, or induction chemotherapy) is less well studied and isn’t a typical approach.

Over the past few years, the role of post-operative, also known as adjuvant, chemo has become increasingly accepted as a standard of care. Several trials have shown an improvement in survival at about 5 years that is in the 5-15% range for recipients of chemo.

As a conclusion to the string of posts on the topic of lymph nodes removed at the time of surgery, I wanted to touch on the issue of what our representative experience is in the US, because I described the results of specialized centers in Japan and Italy that typically yielded large numbers of lymph nodes, often more than 10.

In the past couple of posts we’ve seen that based on evidence from Japan and Rome, number of lymph nodes resected and also the absolute number of positive nodes and/or proportion of positive nodes may be important prognostic variable. A third abstract I reviewed on the same subject came from Peoria, IL, and illustrated a key reason why using these variables may not be as consistently useful as we’d like, at least in many parts of the world.

In the last post I discussed some interesting work from a group in Japan that suggested that the number of lymph nodes that are removed and positive for NSCLC may be a very important prognostic variable, potentially an even more important factor than location of the nodes, which is the basis for how we stage nodal involvement in NSCLC now.

At this year's ASCO meeting, I had the opportunity to review and provide commentary on several presentations from other researchers, all on the topic of how to refine our ability to predict how patients will do after surgery for stage I - IIIA NSCLC, with an idea that this information can help guide decisions about who should receive chemo and who shouldn't.

I’ve previously described the concept of the “precocious metastasis”, the situation in which a patient presents with early stage NSCLC, except for a single metastasis, most typically in the brain or adrenal gland. Our conventional teaching is that a patient with any metastatic disease almost certainly has additional micrometastatic disease, cancer cells floating in the bloodstream, that will inevitably lead to development of new areas of visible metastatic disease in the future (so having a small amount of metastatic disease would be like being “a little pregnant”).

There's a website called Adjuvant! Online, developed by oncologist Peter Ravdin, that is best known for its use after surgery for breast cancer in assessing the value of post-operative chemo. Because I don't really treat breast cancer, I haven't spent time on the website, but I do know that it's a valued resource among practicing oncologists who care for patients with breast cancer.