Procedure may help gauge lung cancer stage

• Efforts to rein in lung cancer, the No. 1 cause of cancer death for U.S. men and women, continue to be a top health priority for doctors and patients alike.
• The latest finding: A minimally invasive procedure may help gauge lung cancer stage, which could curb unneeded surgery in some patients.
• The finding appears in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
• It comes from researchers including Jouke Annema, MD, PhD, of the pulmonary medicine division of Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands.
• The procedure is called transesophageal ultrasound-guided fine needle aspiration, or EUS-FNA.
• In EUS-FNA, doctors use ultrasound technology to guide a fine needle to lymph nodes in the lung.
• The needle harvests cells from the lymph nodes.
• All of the patients had non-small cell lung cancer, the most common kind of lung cancer, according to the American Cancer Society.
• Doctors inserted a scope through a tiny hole in the chest to look at the patients' lungs; tissue samples can be taken and examined by this method.
• The tests may complement each other, the researchers note.
• Lung cancer staging helps determine how a person with lung cancer will do in the long term.
• Lung cancer that has spread to distant sites may not require surgery.
• Better lung cancer staging might cut unneeded lung cancer surgeries, write the researchers.
• They note that up to 40% of thoracotomies (partial or total removal of a lung) for non-small cell lung cancer have been reported to be unnecessary due to imperfections in determining the extent of the disease prior to surgery.
• The researchers estimate that 16% of thoracotomies in their study could have been avoided by using EUS-FNA findings in addition to mediastinoscopy.