Implications of hypercalcemia with respect to diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer.

This study had two objectives. The first was to determine if hypercalcemia presents as an isolated finding in patients with lung cancer prior to the development of abnormalities on chest radiography. The second was to correlate the presence of hypercalcemia with survival after surgical therapy. A review of clinical material over a seven-year period yielded 67 patients with diagnoses of hypercalcemia and lung cancer. No patient presented with surgically curable lung cancer associated with hypercalcemia. A review of the literature disclosed only four cases in which a putative cure occurred in the presence of hypercalcemia. Review of the clinical material and the literature revealed no instance in which hypercalcemia per se led to the diagnosis of clinically occult lung cancer. Hypercalcemia was almost always associated with large tumor masses. Median survival after the discovery of hypercalcemia complicating carcinoma of the lung was one month.