BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVEThe new edition of the TNM staging for lung and pleural tumours has been finished, which put weight on the extent of primary tumor as one of the important prognosises. But little study has performed on the primary tumor extent < or = 2 cm. The aim of this study is to explore the prognosis of patients with tumor extent < or = 2 cm in stage I of non-small cell lung cancer, which helps us to choose the best treatment for these patients.

METHODSRetrospective study on the clinical response and survival time of whom underwent complete surgical resection and diagnosed as T1a of stage I NSCLC from 1998 to 2004 was analyzed. Data was analyzed by SPSS 17.0 software.

RESULTSOverall survival rate was 80.8%. By the study, age (P = 0.241), gender (P = 0.175), history of smoking (P = 0.845), pathologic type ( P =0.265), and systematic mediastinal lymphadenectomy (SML )(P = 0.918) or not, postoperative adjuvant chemotherapy or not ( P = 0.616) and visceral pleural invasion (P = 0.827) were not the prognosises of these patients. Only the tumor differentiation such as poorly differentiated was the important prognosis ( P = 0.01).

CONCLUSIONIn the tumor extent < or = 2 cm of stage I non-small cell lung cancer, the visceral pleural invasion maybe not influence the patients survival. The tumor differentiation is one of the important prognostic factors.