Small Cell Lung Cancer and TNM Staging

Since the characeristics of high invasiveness and metastatic potential of small cell lung cancer, it has long been considered to be associated with poor clinical outcome, especially after surgery. The chemo-radiation, therefore, is the mainstream modality, and its staging relied on American Vterans Aministration system, a simple system mainly from radiation oncologists' idea. With the advances of staging methods in lung cancer, the accuracy of TNM staging has been increasing. More and more retrospective study results demonstrated that the efficacy of surgical intervention for early stage small cell lung cancer was not inferior to that for non-small cell lung cancer. Moreover, modern and precise TNM staging system should be adopted towards surgical candidates of small cell lung cancer.