Curable lung cancer. How to find it and treat it.

Appropriate selection of lung cancer patients for potentially curative surgery demands a careful staging workup. The most adverse prognostic factors should be investigated first because their presence precludes consideration of potentially curative surgical therapy. Best surgical results are obtained in patients with early stages of disease. A quality lung cancer operation requires open thoracotomy with en bloc resection of the tumor and involved adjacent structures and thorough lymph node sampling or resection. Uninvolved lung tissue may be preserved with a variety of surgical techniques that do not compromise the curative intent of the procedure.