The Role of Adjuvant Radiation Therapy for Resected Stage III Thymoma: A Population-Based Study

Surgical Outcomes of Patients With Stage III Thymoma in the Japanese Nationwide Database

“…The overall 10-year survival was 80.2%, which was relatively better than that in previous reports that focused only on thymoma and excluded thymic cancer [4,9].…”

“…In many thymoma studies that included overall stages, incomplete resection was generally identified as a significant predictor of prognosis [9][10][11][12][13]; however, in large cohort studies of stage III thymoma, incomplete resection was not always an adverse factor for OS [1,4,14].…”

“…The outcomes of surgery for patients with stage III thymoma were favorable unless chest wall invasion was present; however, the role of complete resection and appropriate multimodal treatment plan require further investigation. T he treatment of stage III thymoma involves a variety of clinical approaches because of tumor invasion to the surrounding organs [1][2][3][4][5][6]. The gold standard therapy for this disease has not yet been established because of a shortage of data.…”

Thymic epithelial tumours: from basic principles to individualised treatment strategies

“…Post-operative radiotherapy may be administered in the case of microscopically incomplete (R1) resection, with a boost to doses of at least 60 Gy on areas of concern. Radiotherapy consistently decreased recurrence rates from 60-80% to 21-45% in this setting [6,50,54,55,60,61].…”

“…In completely resected stage III tumours, recurrence rates have been reported for a long time as being lower after postoperative radiotherapy [46,[54][55][56], ranging from 0% to 20% versus 40% to 55% after adjuvant radiotherapy or exclusive surgery, respectively [57][58][59][60][61]. Current practice is actually highly variable, but the global trend over recent years is clearly moving towards a less frequent use of post-operative radiotherapy, reserving it for high-risk cases.…”