Lung cancer has recently become the number-one cause of cancer deaths worldwide. The predicted death from non-small cell lung cancer is 162 460 in 2006 in USA. Patients with metastasis or N2/3 disease have dismal prognosis and resectional surgery is generally futile in these subsets. On the another hand, earliest stages indicated better survivals which were not satisfactory. Patients with cIA tumor have 61% 5-year survival, whereas the 5-year survival of cases with pIA tumors is 67% (1). However, patients with earliest stage breast or thyroid cancer have excellent survival probabilities while late stages of these disease indicated poor survival rates (2,3). For these reasons, despite the 6 consecutive staging system, lung cancer staging needed revisions in order to provide more realistic stratifications depending on the T, N and M parameters. New (7th) staging system proposal promises more informative classification(4). International Association of for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC)analyzed total of 100.869 patients from 19 countries. They also used 'recursive partitioning' as a state-of-the-art statistical method(4,5). The T factor classification was also proposed to be revised. T1 status is divided into T1a and T1b, T2 is divided into T2a, T2b. Despite all improvements, 5-year survival rate was 73% in IA patients.
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