Adjuvant chemotherapy after complete resection for early stage NSCLC.

Less than 20-25% of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients present with stage I or II disease are best treated by surgical resection. Long-term survival in NSCLC remains poor also in these early stages: the 5-year survival rate of patients who undergo complete surgical resection is only 40 to 50%. The majority of post-surgical relapses are distant metastases with the risk of a local recurrence after complete resection being less than 10%. Postoperative treatments, including chemotherapy, radiotherapy or both, have been widely evaluated during the last decades and, unfortunately, none has demonstrated any significant impact on survival. Data regarding large-scale adjuvant chemotherapy trials, closed for the accrual almost four to five years ago, will be fully available soon and, hopefully, a specific meta-analysis will be performed.