OBJECTIVESTo analyze the clinical conditions of postoperative patients with IIIA-N2 non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and the prognostic factors related with survival of NSCLC, and to investigate the influence of operation and therapy on prognosis.

METHODSClinical data of 657 inpatient cases with IIIA-N2 NSCLC admitted from January 2000 to December 2005 was retrospectively reviewed. The Kaplan-Meier method was used for survival analysis. The Log-rank law was applied to analyze the relationship between the variables and the prognosis in monovariate analysis, while Cox proportional hazard regression model was used to make multivariate analysis.

RESULTSThe 1-, 3-and 5-year accumulative survival rates of the operative patience were 64.4%, 26.0% and 17.9%, respectively. The median survival time was 18 months. In monovariate analysis, the main unfavorable factors that affect life span involve were the diameter of tumor, T stage, skip metastasis of N2 lymph node, the number of metastatic lymph nodes, the metastasis of subcarinal lymph nodes, adjuvant chemotherapy, the cycle of adjuvant chemotherapy, postoperative radiotherapy, and the modality of therapy (the effect of naive surgery was disappointed, while the prognosis of the patients with adjuvant chemoradiotherapy was better than those with chemotherapy alone). A multivariate analysis using Cox regression identified 5 factors of prognosis: the diameter of tumor (P = 0.001), the metastasis of subcarinal lymph nodes (P = 0.019), the number of metastatic lymph nodes (P = 0.006), the cycle of adjuvant chemotherapy (P = 0.007), postoperative radiotherapy (P = 0.055), and adjuvant chemoradiotherapy (P = 0.026).

CONCLUSIONSThe 5-year survival rate of the patients with IIIA-N2 Non-small cell lung cancer is poor. Tumor size, the metastasis of subcarinal lymph nodes, the number of metastatic LNs, the cycle of adjuvant chemotherapy, and postoperative radiotherapy have an effect on the prognosis. The prognosis of postoperative patients with single-level N2 and multi-level N2 disease is similar, and the key point of survival is the number of nodes involved. The therapeutic effect of patience given adjuvant chemoradiotherapy is superior to those treated with adjuvant chemotherapy.