The effect of radiotherapy and surgery on stage IIIA/B NSCLC patients treated with chemotherapy

Background: the combination of radiotherapy and surgery is used to treat locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer (nsclc). the aim of this study was to analyze iiia/ b nsclc patients treated with chemotherapy from the surveillance, epidemiology, and end results (seer) database to clarify whether patient prognosis correlated with surgery and radiotherapy. materials and methods: the iiia/b nsclc patients were selected from the seer database and classified into iiia (n0-1), iiia (n2), iiib (n2), and iiib (n3). cox analyses and kaplan–meier method were used to estimate the prognostic factors and lung cancer specific survival (lcss) curves. results: we divided 7933 cases into iiia (n0-1), iiia (n2), iiib (n2), and iiib (n3). cox regression showed that age, sex, primary site, grade, treatment, t stage, and marriage were independent risk factors for iiia (n0-1); age, sex, treatment, and t stage had prognostic significance for iiia (n2); age, sex, primary site, grade, treatment, and t stage were prognostic factors for iiib (n2); and age and primary site had effect on the prognosis of iiib(n3). the effect of chemotherapy-surgery was better than that of chemotherapypreoperative radiotherapy-surgery and chemotherapy-surgery-postoperative radiotherapy for iiia (n0-1). in iiia (n2) and iiib, radiotherapy did not improve the lcss. conclusion: surgery offered more survival benefits for iiia (n0-1) patients. radiotherapy did not improve the lcss of iiia (n2) and iiib patients.