Lung cancer and intensive care: Extending our look beyond crude mortality

摘要

To the Editor: Slatore et al1 recently published a study concerning the outcomes of nonsurgical patients with lung cancer who were admitted to intensive care units (ICUs). This topic is of utmost interest, given that these patients account for 8% of cancer-related ICU admissions and up to 27% of ICU admissions involving patients with solid malignancies.2'3 The authors described the largest series published to date, reporting overall hospital and 6-month survival rates of 76% and 35%, respectively. No changes in survival rates were observed over a 16-year period. To the best of our knowledge, only five previous studies evaluated posthospital survival in this patient population (Table 1). All of them included fewer than 150 patients, were carried out in referral cancer centers, and reported comparable posthospital mortality rates.