Lung cancer prognostic factors from the Aichi Cancer Registry.

Lung cancer prognostic factors have been evaluated on the basis of three-year survival rates for 2,830 lung cancer patients diagnosed between 1983 and 1986 and reported to the Aichi Cancer Registry. In the univariate analyses, the former in each pair of following factors showed a significantly better prognosis than the latter: early vs. late stage of disease, surgically-treated vs. non-surgically-treated cases, adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma vs. large cell and small cell carcinoma, cases detected by screening vs. others, young vs. old patients, females vs. males, non-smokers vs. smokers. The association of prognosis with these factors, other than smoking and histological type, remained statistically significant throughout multivariate analysis. When analyzed according to histological type, disease stage was the most important prognostic factor, across all histological types, and surgery was the second most important prognostic factor, except in cases of small cell carcinoma. Sex and method of detection were significantly associated with survival rates in adenocarcinoma and small cell carcinoma, and the association with smoking was of borderline significance for adenocarcinoma.