Prognostic factors of patients with pathologic stage I lung adenocarcinoma

Lung cancer remains one of the most common causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Increasingly more research is aimed at investigating the clinicopathologic parameters or gene mutations involved in the survival of patients with lung cancer. Although the 5-year survival rate of stage I non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is between 68% and 92% (stage IA1 to IB) (1), there is still much scope for progress. In our previous study (2), we reviewed the predictors of postoperative recurrence in NSCLC and postulated that those results may help optimize patient selection for specified surveillance guidelines and personalized adjuvant therapies to prevent potential occult micrometastases. In Taiwan, lung adenocarcinoma is the most common histologic subtype (12,648/21,536, 58.73%) that had become more prevalent among non-smoking women (3). Moreover, predictors of postoperative outcomes in lung adenocarcinoma have been a popular investigatory target in recent years. Therefore, we used the search engine PubMed and reviewed papers about the risk factors of postoperative outcomes in patients with stage I lung adenocarcinoma (Table 1)