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Although surgery especially with Lobectomy currently reasonable treatment for small cell lung cancer stage I survival rate, however related to their criteria (SCLC stage I) as extensive disease from the present of small cell lung cancer, the randomized trial would be had difficulties to determined best option treatment whether involved chemotherapy or further radiation protocols including side effects may occurs.

Latest study by James B. Yu, MD, from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, said, “We didn’t know wheteher there were any studies that had recently looked at whether this patient needed further radiation or not, especially in light of better chemotherapy and improved staging techniques, and that is when we decided to take a look in the SEER database.”

Based on their cohort study that involved 247 patient with stage I SCLC underwent surgical resection between 1988 to 2004 with the range of the age between 27 – 94 years with;
- 83% patients had only lobectomy, and
- 15% patients had lobectomy with additional radiation therapy, and remain unknown, showed;

- 5-year overall survival with only had lobectomy treatment about 50.3%
- 5-year overall survival with additional radiation therapy about 57%

However Dr. Yu add this study has several limitation as he said, “This is an analysis of the SEER database. There is inherent selection bias and there is a lot of information that we just do not know. For instance, we don’t know why some patients got radiation, or what kind of radiation they did get. In addition, we have assumed that all patients got chemotherapy, but there is no information in the database about which chemotherapy they received. All we can say is that people who have a stage I SCLC seem to have reasonable survival after surgery alone. But that is as far as we can go in terms of a conclusion.”

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