Abstract:

Objective
To study the visceral pleural invasion （VPI） situation of  the patients with early postoperative non-small cell lung cancer （NSCLC）,and to clarify its influence in prognosis of NSCLC patients. Methods 261 NSCLC patients were  followed up in outpatient department  who were diagnosed as the pathologic stage Ⅰ－Ⅱ after surgical radical operation from 2007 to 2011.The median follow-up time was 36 months.All the patients were divided into VPI group(n=130) and non-VPI group(n=131).χ2 test or Fisher  exact test was used to analyze the categorical variables;Kaplan-Meier method was used to estimate the disease-free survival（DFS） rate  and overall survival（OS） rate;COX proprotional hazards model was used to analyze the relationship between the clinical characteristic and prognosis of NSCLC patients.Results The  1-year OS rate  of the patients in VPI group was 90.77%,meanwhile it was 93.13% in non-VPI group,there was no significant difference between  two groups（P>0.05）. The 3-year and 5-year OS rates (69.23% and 63.85%) of the patients in VPI group were lower  than those in non-VPI group (80.15% and 74.05%)(P<0.05).COX unuvariate and multivariate analysis indicated that age,tumor size,and VPI  were the influnencing factors of  DFS and OS of the NSCLC patients (P<0.05).Conclusion VPI is one of the poor prognostic factors of early postoperative NSCLC patients,and it plays an  role in criteria of tumor clinicopathological  stage.

Key words: cancer,non-small cell lung, visceral pleural invasion, prognosis, overall survival, disease-free survival