Locoregional recurrence of early-stage surgically resected non-small-cell lung cancer: The importance of close follow-up and consistent definitions

摘要

Our group was greatly interested in reading the retrospective study by Lopez Guerra et al. which was recently published in the Annals of Oncology [1]. The authors' discussion included one of our publications [2]. They stated that our rates of locoregional recurrence were higher than theirs or those previously reported in the literature (In fact, our 5-year rate of locoregional recurrence for patients with resected Nl disease (46%) was very similar to the rate reported by Higgins et al. (40%) [3]). However, there are several methodologic reasons why Lopez Guerra et al. may have found a much lower rate of recurrence than in our series.