Surgical treatment of bronchial adenomas: results of 29 cases and review of the literature.

The low-grade malignant potential of bronchial adenoma has been widely reported in the medical literature. During the past 12 years we have treated 29 patients with this disease, 18 (62%) of whom required conventional lobectomy or pneumonectomy, because most of our cases had come to our center after having inappropriate treatments in other centers and loosing time. In these cases we observed either a total obstruction of a bronchus or a destroyed parenchyma due to recurrent pulmonary infections. For this reason, the number of pulmonary resections is more important than conservative surgical procedures in our center. The other 11 cases (38%) were treated by bronchoplasty or more conservative resectional procedures. There was no recurrence and the survival rate was about 96 per cent at 5 years. We believe that, in our series, we would have mostly been able to perform conservative types of resections if we could have diagnosed the disease in its early stages.