BACKGROUND: The proportion of patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) harboring epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutations is relatively high in China. However, these patients currently lack significant benefits from available neoadjuvant treatment options. This study aims to explore the potential application value of neoadjuvant targeted therapy by evaluating its efficacy and safety in patients with EGFR-mutant resectable lung adenocarcinoma. METHODS: A multicenter retrospective study was used to analyze the treatment effect of patients with stage IIA-IIIB EGFR-mutant lung adenocarcinoma who underwent surgical resection after receiving neoadjuvant targeted therapy from July 2019 to October 2024. RESULTS: A total of 24 patients with EGFR-mutant lung adenocarcinoma from three centers were included in this study. All patients successfully underwent surgery and achieved R0 resection of 100.0%. The objective response rate (ORR) was 83.3% (20/24) . The major pathologic response (MPR) rate was 37.5% (9/24), with 2 patients (8.3%) achieving pathological complete response (pCR). During neoadjuvant therapy, 13 out of 24 patients (54.2%) experienced adverse events of grade 1-2, with no occurrences of ≥ grade 3. The most common treatment-related adverse events were rash (n=4, 16.7%), mouth sores (n=2, 8.3%), and diarrhea (n=2, 8.3%). The median follow-up time was 33.0 months, no deaths occurred in all patients, and the overall survival (OS) rate was 100.0%. The 1-year disease-free survival (DFS) rate was 91.1%, and the 2-year DFS rate remained at 86.2%. CONCLUSIONS The application of neoadjuvant targeted therapy in patients with EGFR-mutant resectable lung adenocarcinoma is safe and feasible, and is expected to become a highly promising neoadjuvant treatment option for the patients with EGFR-mutant lung adenocarcinoma.
Humans ; ErbB Receptors/metabolism* ; Male ; Female ; Middle Aged ; Adenocarcinoma of Lung/surgery* ; Neoadjuvant Therapy ; Lung Neoplasms/surgery* ; Aged ; Retrospective Studies ; Mutation ; Adult

The esophagus plays an extremely important physiological function in human body, and esophageal cancer is a highly lethal disease among all the malignancies. Esophagectomy is still the main treatment for locally advanced esophageal cancer. Ensuring the efficacy of oncology plays a crucial role in exploring organ preservation in the treatment of esophageal cancer. We should always be aware of the inherent difficulties and potential harms of organ preservation for esophageal cancer treatment and seek a personalized and reasonable balance between ensuring cure and preserving organs, provide the best treatment design for esophageal cancer patients, to achieve maximum therapeutic effect without sacrificing the life quality of patients.

With the change of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) prevention and control strategy in China, the number of COVID-19 cases has increased significantly recently, which has also brought new challenges to the perioperative risk control of thoracic surgery. This paper puts forward several suggestions, aiming to standardize the preoperative screening and evaluation during the COVID-19 period, strictly grasp the indications and timing of surgery, optimize the medical management process, individualize surgical decision-making, and minimize the risk of COVID-19 infection to surgery.

Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is an important malignancy. Surgery is the earliest treatment and still the main strategy for lung cancer at present. Recently, significant progress has been made in the diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer, covering new theories, knowledge, and methods that urgently require the attention and learning of surgeons. Only by following the new situation and strategies of oncology and making corresponding changes can surgical techniques be perfectly combined with the new developments in oncology, avoiding over-diagnosis/underdiagnosis and over-treatment/undertreatment of lung cancer, and ultimately creating new achievements for patients' long-term cure.

Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma is one of the malignant tumors with a high incidence in China. The main pathological anatomy is the obstruction of the diseased esophagus. Nutritional disorders and a series of relevant pathophysiological changes are the main factors affec-ting the safe implementation of treatment and the long-term survival of patients. Therefore, timely correction of nutritional disorders is the main component of treatment. The ideal treatment for locally advanced esophageal squamous cell carcinoma is induction systemic treatment followed by surgery. The outstanding problems in clinical management of esophageal carcinoma are that only short-term attention is paid to postoperative nutrition support, ignoring preoperative nutrition along with the major anticancer treatment, the rehabilitation of patients' swallowing function after surgery, as well as nutrition and weight management. The author reviews the unique role of tube feeding with element enteral nutrition during the whole course of treatment of esophageal cancer, in order to provide reference for its standardized management.

With the change of COVID-19 prevention and control strategy in China, the number of COVID-19 cases has increased significantly recently, which has also brought new challenges to the perioperative risk control of thoracic surgery. This paper puts forward several suggestions, aiming to standardize the preoperative screening and evaluation during the COVID-19 period, strictly grasp the indications and timing of surgery, optimize the medical management process, individualize surgical decision-making, and minimize the risk of COVID-19 infection to surgery.

(1) Surgery is the first method to cure early stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Ground glass nodule (GGO) like lung adenocarcinoma should be regarded as a new clinical issue to avoid over-treatment. The deep meaning of multidisciplinary pathological classification of lung adenocarcinoma should be fully understood to avoid over-diagnosis. The T staging of lung adenocarcinoma mixed with GGO components should be correctly understood to avoid over-staging. We should carefully understand the new data of relationship between sublobectomy and prognosis to avoid excessive resection. Attention should be paid to the research progress of minimal residual disease (MRD) to avoid insufficient treatment. (2) The treatment strategy of resectable stage Ⅲ NSCLC should be surgery with individualized systemic treatment. Locally advanced NSCLC dominated by Ⅲa-N2 NSCLC is a kind of disease with high multi-dimensional heterogeneity. In theory, preoperative treatment is superior to postoperative treatment, and molecular diagnosis should be made along with pretreatment staging, so as to select preoperative treatment. The patients with negative driver gene mutation obtained better pathological complete response/major pathological response (PCR/MPR) from immunotherapy compared to those from chemotherapy, and the better PCR/MPR is expected to be transformed into overall survival (OS). The data of preoperative treatment in patients with positive driver gene mutation are few, whereas the data of postoperative targeted treatment are much better than those of postoperative chemotherapy. (3) The effective systemic treatment strategy has "created" many long-term survivors with stage Ⅳ NSCLC, and has changed the original concept and population of "oligometastasis". Attention should be paid to the individual ineffective lesions in stage Ⅳ patients with long-term survival. It is also necessary to explore how to intervene in the resection of "oligometastasis" of stage Ⅳ NSCLC at an appropriate time and in an appropriate way, which may be one of the main tasks of lung cancer surgery in the future.

TNM system should be used in the staging of small cell lung cancer (SCLC), especially in the limited stages of SCLC. Preoperative staging should be strengthened to avoid invalid operation due to insufficient diagnosis. Retrospective studies showed that the efficacy of surgery (+ chemotherapy) in early SCLC is comparable to the outcome of resection for early stage non-small cell lung cancer, which shakes the concept of "chemotherapy/chemoradiotherapy as the main treatment of SCLC". The best operative procedure of SCLC is lobectomy. Sub-lobectomy and pneumonectomy are inferior to that of lobectomy, but still better than chemotherapy/chemo-radiotherapy in terms to long term survival. All these findings need to be confirmed by large sample prospective randomized studies.

Neoadjuvant therapy has become the first choice for locally advanced esophageal carcinoma. Patients with post-neoadjuvant positive lymph node staging (ypN+) have poor prognosis, and there is no effective adjuvant therapy. Programmed death protein-1 (PD-1) antibody can obtain better clinical efficacy in the treatment of advanced esophageal cancer. The authors designed a multicenter, prospective, randomized controlled clinical trial of Toripalimab (PD-1 antibody) adjuvant therapy on esophageal squamous cell carcinoma patients with ypN+ after the treatment of neoadjuvant chemotherapy combined with surgical resection, in order to provide clinical practices for the adjuvant treatment of ypN+ patients.

Objective:To investigate the epidemiological characteristics and current status of surgical management for esophageal cancer in China.Methods:A national database was setup through a network platform. The clinical data of esophageal cancer treated by surgery was collected from 70 major hospitals in China between January 2009 and December 2014.Results:Complete data of 8 181 cases of esophageal cancer patients who underwent surgery were recorded in the database and recruited in the analysis. Among them, 6 052 cases were male and 2 129 were female, the average age was 60.5 years.The epidemiological investigation results showed that 148 cases (1.8%) had history of psychological trauma, 7 527 cases (92.0%) were lower social economic status, 5 072 cases (62.0%) were short of fresh vegetables and fruits, 6 544 cases (80.0%) ate rough food frequently, 3 722 cases (45.5%) drank untreated water directly from lake or river or shallow well, 3 436 cases (42.0%) had a unhealthy eating habit, including habits of eating food fast (507 cases, 6.2%), eating hot food or drinking hot tea/soup (998 cases, 12.2%), eating fried food (1 939 cases, 23.7%), 4 410 cases (53.9%) had the habits of smoking cigarettes and 2 822 cases (34.5%) drank white wine frequently.The pathological results showed that 7 813 cases (95.5%) were squamous cell carcinoma, 267 cases were adenocarcinoma (3.3%), 25 cases were adenosquamous cell carcinoma (0.3%) and 50 cases were small cell carcinoma (0.6%). A total of 1 800 cases (22.0%) received preoperative neoadjuvant therapy due to locally advanced disease or difficulty of resection. The esophagectomies were performed through left thoracotomy approach in 5 870 cases (71.8%), through right chest approach in 2 215 cases (27.1%), and the remain 96 cases (1.2%) received surgery though other approaches.A total of 8 001 cases (97.8%) underwent radical resection, the other 180 cases (2.2%) received palliative resection. The 30-day postoperative mortality rate was 0.5%, the overall ≥ grade Ⅱ postoperative complication rate was 11.6% (951 cases). The 1-yr, 3-yr, and 5-yr overall actual survival rates were 82.6%, 61.6%, and 52.9%, respectively.Conclusions:The data analysis of the national database for esophageal cancer shows that bad eating habits or eating rough food without enough nutrients, lower social and economic status, drinking white wine and smoking cigarettes frequently may be correlated with tumorigenesis of esophageal cancer. However, strong evidences produced by prospective observation studies are needed. Overall, the long-term survival of esophageal cancer patients has been improved gradually due to the application of advanced surgical techniques and reasonable multimodality treatment.