Clinical examination of pleural lavage cytology in patients undergoing primary lung cancer resection by thoracotomy.

Modified intrapleural cisplatin treatment for lung cancer with positive pleural lavage cytology or malignant effusion

“…Although the prognosis of patients who have primary lung cancer with positive PLC is poor [1][2][3][4], there have been no new therapeutic methods to alleviate these patients' condition. Recently, Ichinose et al [8] reported a prematurely trial of intrapleural hypotonic cisplatin treatment for PLC positive patients.…”

“…These reports also reported poor prognosis in these patients, with 3-year survival rate ranging from 23% to 44% [1,5,6], and 5-year survival rate ranging from 0% to 33.3% [1,3,4], respectively. Ichinose et al reported a more favorable survival rate (41.5%-43.1%), however, the percentage of the patients who had p-stage I or II disease was over than 50% in their study, as contrasted with the proportion of the patients' stages in our study that included two third of the patients with stage III or IV.…”

“…The prognosis of patients who have primary lung cancer with positive pleural lavage cytology (PLC) is poor compared to that of other patients who have lung cancer in the same histological stage, but are PLC negative [1][2][3][4]. Some investigators have insisted that we should treat patients with positive PLC the same as patients with malignant pleural effusions that are pathologically categorized to stage IIIB [5,6].…”