Is immediate chest radiotherapy obligatory for any or all patients with limited-stage non-small cell carcinoma of the lung? Yes.

External irradiation with the greatest technical sophistication available is indicated in all patients with inoperable non-small cell carcinoma of the lung confined to the primary site and to regional lymph nodes including the ipsilateral supraclavicular nodes. Irradiation with moderately high doses results in responses in 40%-65% of all patients. With irradiation to a level of at least 6000 rad in 30 fractions in 6 weeks, greater than 60% of patients never fail in the chest. Some of these patients become long-term, disease-free survivors. Until it is possible clearly to predict those patients who do not respond and thereby to justify an approach other than thoracic irradiation, it is necessary to offer radiation therapy to all of these patients. Since local control is far from satisfactory, one can certainly justify investigating new approaches, including further increases of the total dose, altered fractionation schemes, addition of radiosensitizers, and high linear energy transfer radiations. Since distant metastases frequently appear in spite of thorough pretreatment evaluations, one can also justify investigating the addition of systemic agents, both cytotoxic drugs and biologic response modifiers. Benefit from these systemic approaches may be completely masked, even in patients with disseminated disease, by failure to prevent complications and death due to the intrathoracic tumor.