Personalized treatment strategy for ground-glass opacity-featured lung cancer / 中国胸心血管外科临床杂志

ABSTRACT

@#Along with the popularity of low-dose computed tomography lung cancer screening, an increasing number of lung ground-glass opacity (GGO) lesions are detected. The pathology of GGO could be benign, but persistent GGO indicates early-stage lung cancer. Distinct from traditional lung cancer, GGO-featured lung cancer is more common in the young, nonsmokers and females. GGO-featured lung cancer represents an indolent type of malignancy with a long time to intervene. However, there is still no consensus on the screening, pathology, surgical procedure, and postoperative surveillance of GGO-featured lung cancer. Therefore, we proposed a personalized treatment strategy for GGO-featured lung cancer. The screening for GGO-featured lung cancer should be conducted at young age and low frequency. Adenocarcinoma in situ, minimally invasive adenocarcinoma, lepidic, and non-lepidic growth patterns could present as GGO. The following issues should be taken into consideration while determining the treatment of GGO-featured lung cancer avoiding treating benign disease as malignancies, avoiding treating early-stage disease as advanced-stage disease, avoiding treating indolent malignancy as aggressive malignancy, and choosing appropriate timing to receive surgery without affecting life tracks and career developments. Bronchoscope and bone scan are not necessary for preoperative examinations of GGO-featured lung adenocarcinoma. For selected patients, sublobar resection without mediastinal lymph node dissection might be sufficient. Intraoperative frozen section is an effective method to guide resection strategy. Given the excellent survival of GGO-featured lung cancer, a less intensive postoperative surveillance strategy may be sufficient.