Principles of Lung Cancer Treatment

The treatment of lung cancer is divided into several aspects, the first one is surgery, the second one is chemotherapy, the third one is radiotherapy, and the fourth one is molecular targeted therapy. Other treatments include immunotherapy, comprehensive treatment with traditional Chinese medicine, etc. 1. For early stage patients, especially those in stage I and II, the goal is to be cured, so it is better for patients to undergo surgical resection at an early stage if there is no physical condition or limitation. This is a very important condition towards radical treatment; 2, if the patient enters stage III or IV, especially for stage III patients, surgery should not be performed easily. Preoperative chemotherapy or radiotherapy for stage III patients may create very good conditions for complete resection. Therefore, patients, especially those with stage IIIA, can undergo preoperative neoadjuvant therapy; 3. For patients with stage IIIB or IVA, the situation should be clarified first, such as metastasis in the pleura or metastasis in the contralateral supraclavicular lymph nodes, or large trachea and blood vessels are infiltrated by the tumor, and the patient’s staging may have already entered stage IIIB. If there is metastasis to distant organs, it is stage IV. For patients with stage IIIB and stage IV, surgery is not favored, and chemotherapy and molecular targeted therapy should be used as the main comprehensive treatment, which is a more appropriate strategy for lung cancer treatment; 4. For patients who are considered to be in early stage before surgery, the final decision of whether or not to carry out chemotherapy or other targeted therapies should be based on the pathological results after surgery. For patients with stage I, if the pleura or lung membrane is infiltrated by cancer cells, which is generally known as stage IB, although most of the patients do not have the risk of recurrence, the risk of recurrence is much higher than that of patients without lung membrane infiltration. At present, it is also advocated that postoperative adjuvant chemotherapy should be given to this group of patients, as well as to patients with stage II, IIA, and IIB.