Surgery is recommended for non-small cell lung cancer from stage 1 to stage 3a, and it is of significance for prolonging patients’ survival.
Patients with stage 3a non-small cell lung cancer have local lymph node metastasis or local infiltration, and need to be treated with adjuvant chemotherapy after surgery, and if the lung cancer is not resected cleanly, local radiotherapy should be performed to control the recurrence rate. In this case, patients can also choose to undergo neoadjuvant chemotherapy to control the local lesions, so as to create favorable conditions for surgery and improve the long-term survival of patients.
For small cell lung cancer, surgery is not recommended, except for early stage small cell lung cancer where surgery is recommended, and small cell lung cancer with advanced tumor stage where radiotherapy is the mainstay.
Thus, for non-small cell lung cancer patients, stage 3a is recommended for surgical treatment.