Survival of chemo-radiotherapy-treated and thermotherapy-treated patients with unresectable lung cancer.

Prognosis and survival of unresectable lung cancer patients is poor. The 5-year survival varies from 3 to 15% without relevant differences between treated and non-treated patients. The 2-year survival of comparable patients treated with chemo-radiotherapy (CH-RT) (n=63) and thermotherapy (RFT) (n=40) was studied. The 2-year follow-up survival curves did not differ for the groups in general but the survival time was longer for stage IV and non-small cell lung cancer in the RFT-group (13.2 mo and 13.4 mo, respectively) compared with CH-RT-group (8.4 mo and 9.6 mo, respectively). The difference was highly statistically significant (p<0.005).