MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Raymond U. Osarogiagbon, MBBS, FACP Translational Lung Cancer Research Multidisciplinary Thoracic Oncology Program Baptist Centers for Cancer Care Memphis, TN  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Most long-term survivors of lung cancer are among the patients who were fortunate enough to be identified early enough to undergo curative-intent surgery. In the US, 60,000 individuals undergo curative-intent surgery for lung cancer every year. This number is likely to increase over the next few years as lung cancer screening becomes more widely adopted. Unfortunately, fewer than 50% of patients who undergo curative-intent surgery actually survive up to 5 years. We show that the quality of surgery, especially the quality of pathologic nodal staging is a powerful driver of survival differences between groups of patients. In general, pathologic nodal staging (important as it is stratifying patients into risk groups so those at high risk can be offered additional treatments to increase the chances of cure while those at truly low risk can be left alone without exposure to cost and side-effects of additional treatments) is very poorly done. We show how the percentage of patients whose pathologic staging met sequentially more stringently-define thoroughness of staging metrics falls off sharply, while the survival sequentially increases. (more…)