At the European Congress of Thoracic Surgery (ESTS), underway in Milan until 6 June, Giuseppe Cardillo, director of the UOC Thoracic Surgery of the San Camillo Forlanini hospital in Rome and Rene Petersen, professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Rygshospitalet Hospital in Copenhagen , presented the first European guidelines on the surgical treatment of ground glass lung cancer. The study, the result of the work of the team made up of 11 European researchers and a Chinese scholar, was accepted in the journal ‘European Journal of CardioThoracic Surgery’ (EJCTS).
“The new European guidelines represent a milestone in the treatment of these nodules, the detection of which can be occasional or can take place as part of lung cancer screening programs – says Narciso Mostarda, general manager of the San Camillo-Forlanini Healthcare Company – we are proud that Professor Cardillo is leading the group of experts and representing our country, to whom all the company’s esteem goes for this important step forward for research”.
“Ground glass lung tumors, also called ‘ground glass opacities’, are nodules up to 3 centimeters in diameter, which are not completely solid and have a so-called ‘ground glass’, evanescent component – explains the study – For this reason , such nodules are defined as subsolid, a category that includes both mixed nodules, with both solid and ground-glass components, and pure ground-glass nodules, with no solid component.Subsolid nodules are more frequently tumors than solid nodules, however they have a decidedly better prognosis, with a long-term survival that can reach 90%-100%.In practice, identifying and treating a subsolid nodule is equivalent to saving the lives of our patients”.
“Surgeries to remove early-stage lung tumors, such as subsolid nodules in most cases, are performed with minimally invasive techniques that involve the use of one or two holes (about 1-2 cm in diameter) through advanced technologies guided by the robot or by thoracoscopy. These techniques, saving the patient a cut of about 15 centimeters on the thoracic part, also allow complex operations and very limited removals of the lung to be carried out, safeguarding the healthy portion of the organ”, recalls the study .
“European guidelines have documented that the classic lobectomy can be replaced in this type of tumor by a segmentectomy, i.e. a partial resection of the pulmonary lobe, a much less disabling operation. This allows for a more rapid return to the patient’s usual habits in the absence or almost no post-operative respiratory deficit, while maintaining the principles of oncological radicalism.Patients will have to rely on the specialists of the multidisciplinary groups that treat lung tumors, who, in the light of our guidelines, will decide the best treatment for the individual patient ” concludes Cardillo.
