Prospective observational cohort study of postoperative risk and prognosis scoring for elderly patients with medically operable lung cancer (JACS1303)

Excerpt

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide and is a very common disease in the elderly population. Its incidence in this particular population is expected to increase further. In Japan, the total number of operations for primary lung cancer reported in 2013 has reached 37,008, showing a steady increase over the years. Among those who underwent surgery for this condition, 52.4 % of the patients were aged 70 years or above, and 11.9 % of the patients were aged 80 years or above [1]. This percentage has gradually increased because the aging of Japan’s demographic structure is becoming more pronounced. The Japanese Joint Committee of Lung Cancer Registry previously reported a large-scale retrospective study which was designed to identify the predictors of long-term survival and the risk factors for complications after surgery in patients aged 80 years or above with clinical stage I non-small cell lung cancer [2]. Although the operative mortality of octogenarian patients was reported to be 1.4 % and was satisfactorily low, one-third of those patients died from other causes such as an illness during the postoperative follow-up. Comorbidity is a factor associated with both prognosis and operative risk. Notably, these results were still based on the retrospective study. Therefore, we have started a multicenter large-scale prospective observational cohort study to evaluate details of the comorbidities and comprehensive geriatric assessment and to develop a scoring system that indicates the operative risk and prognosis of octogenarian patients with medically operative lung cancer (UMIN000016756). …