Strategy of intentional limited resection for lung adenocarcinoma in situ

The current issue of European Journal of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery published the remarkable work of Sagawa and associates (1), which demonstrated excellent postoperative outcomes following limited resection for small-sized lung ground-glass opacity (GGO) with an intraoperative pathological diagnosis of bronchioloalveolar carcinoma (BAC). The authors conducted a prospective, multi-institutional study of limited resection for these tumors. In their report, 39 of the 53 patients with an intraoperative pathological diagnosis of BAC underwent wedge resection, and the 5-year disease-specific and overall survival rates were 100% and 98.1%, respectively