[Combined-modality therapy for lung cancer]

Abstract

Lung cancer is treated with surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy according to histology and clinical stage. Advanced stage lung cancer patients cannot be cured, but early and locally-advanced stage patients can be cured by intensive combined-modality therapy. Combined-modality therapy with surgery plus adjuvant chemotherapy is standard for resectable IB-IIIA non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and stage I small cell lung cancer (SCLC) patients. Chemoradiotherapy is standard for unresectable locally-advanced NSCLC and limited-stage SCLC patients. Recently, several new drugs, molecular targeted drugs, have become available for clinical use and trials. We reviewed standard and new strategy of combined-modality therapy for early and locally-advanced lung cancer patients.