Adjuvant Chemotherapy Improves Survival in Surgically Resected Stage IB Squamous Lung Cancer.

Background: At present there is a significant lack of clinical data for patients with surgically resected stage I squamous lung cancer. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of postoperative chemotherapy in this specific population.

Methods: We retrospectively identified patients who had undergone complete squamous lung cancer resection at the Shanghai Chest Hospital between January 2008 and January 2014.

Results: A total of 596 patients (236 stage IA, 360 stage IB) were included in this study. Results demonstrated that adjuvant chemotherapy (ACT) could provide longer overall survival for patients with p-stage IB disease (hazard ratio [HR], 0.56; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.34-0.90; p = 0.017). Among p-stage IB patients the ACT-treated cohort trended toward a benefit (HR, 0.69; 95% CI, 0.45-1.04) in recurrence-free survival but failed to reach statistical significance (p = 0.076). After propensity score matching the HRs of recurrence-free survival and overall survival were 0.58 (95% CI, 0.35-0.96; p = 0.033) and 0.49 (95% CI, 0.27-0.88; p = 0.017), respectively. With regards to patients with p-stage IA disease, neither overall survival (HR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.34-2.27; p = 0.783) nor recurrence-free survival (HR, 0.79; 95% CI, 0.38-1.65; p = 0.534) was significantly different when compared between patients receiving ACT and those who did not. Similar results were also achieved after propensity score matching.

Conclusions: The data presented herein demonstrated that ACT might provide survival benefits for squamous lung cancer patients with p-stage IB disease.