Seven preoperative factors have strong predictive value for postoperative pneumonia in patients undergoing thoracoscopic lung cancer surgery.

Background: Postoperative pneumonia (POP) is a hospital acquired pneumonia that occurs >48 hours after tracheal intubation. The diagnosis of POP should be based on clinical and radiological findings within 30 days after surgery. It is a common complication after thoracoscopic surgery for lung cancer patients. However, the specific impact of preoperative comorbidities on the incidence of POP remains unclear. This study aimed to analyze the preoperative data of patients with lung cancer to help surgeons predict the risk of incidence of POP after thoracoscopic lung resection.

Methods: This study is a prospective study that included patients with lung cancer who were scheduled for thoracoscopic surgery in 1 year. All cases came from two medical centers. Preoperative demographic information, tumor information, preoperative comorbidities, quality of life scores, and incidence of POP were collected. Variables were screened by univariate analysis and multivariate regression. Finally, a prediction model was constructed. A total of 53 preoperative factors were included as candidate predictors. The binary outcome variable was defined as the presence or absence of POP. The incidence of POP was the primary outcome variable. The predictive performance of the model was verified internally through 1,000 iterations of bootstrap resampling.

Results: A total of 1,229 patients with lung cancer who underwent thoracoscopic surgery were enrolled. In addition, 196 cases (15.95%) had POP; 1,025 (83.40%) patients had comorbid conditions. The total number of comorbidity diagnosed in all samples was 2,929. The prediction model suggested that patients with advanced age, high body mass index (BMI), smoking, poor physical condition, respiratory diseases, diabetes, and neurological diseases were more likely to develop POP. The area under the curve (AUC) and Brier scores were 0.851 and 0.091, respectively. The expected and observed results were in strong agreement, according to the likelihood of POP calibration curve.

Conclusions: The constructed model is capable of evaluating the probability of POP occurrence in patients with lung cancer. Seven preoperative factors in patients with lung cancer were found to be associated with increased probability of having pneumonia after thoracoscopic lung resection. This model can help predict the incidence of POP after surgery.