Klin Onkol 1995; 8(02): 52-54.
Summary: The mediastinal lymphatic nodes tumor involvement is an important disease prognosis factor in lung cancer. The profit of the invasive surgical mediastinal staging for judgment of resecability when compared with noninvasive ones without possibility of histological verification is in the accuracy of the former. Mediastinoscopy, mediastintomy and newer even videothoracoscopy allows reliable selection of the possible curative lung resection candidates and identification of patients with nonrese-cable disease with low morbidity and mortality rates, thus enables to avoid unnecessary explorative thoracotomies.
The authors during 1993 Jan 1st to 1994 Dec 31st, when they begun more intensively to use the invasive mediastinal staging methods in primary lung cancers, have reached acceptable rate of explorative thoracotomies for unresecable disease.
