Dr. Jed Gorden, Swedish Cancer Institute, describes the differences between bronchoscopy and endobronchial ultrasound, highlighting the advantages of EBUS in diagnosis and staging.

Dr. Heather Wakelee, Stanford University Medical Center, discusses the purpose of adjuvant chemotherapy, and which patients benefit most from it.

Dr. David Harpole, Duke University Medical Center, defines the concept of mediastinal node sterilization and its use after neoadjuvant therapy.

Dr. David Harpole, Duke University Medical Center, describes the mediastinoscopy and its use in lung cancer staging.

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.