Since the characeristics of high invasiveness and metastatic potential of small cell lung cancer, it has long been considered to be associated with poor clinical outcome, especially after surgery. The chemo-radiation, therefore, is the mainstream modality, and its staging relied on American Vterans Aministration system, a simple system mainly from radiation oncologists' idea. With the advances of staging methods in lung cancer, the accuracy of TNM staging has been increasing. More and more retrospective study results demonstrated that the efficacy of surgical intervention for early stage small cell lung cancer was not inferior to that for non-small cell lung cancer. Moreover, modern and precise TNM staging system should be adopted towards surgical candidates of small cell lung cancer.
小细胞肺癌的临床侵袭性强，易于转移，因而长期以来认为手术疗效较差，治疗方法主要是放化疗，因此分期手段也以美国退伍军人肺癌协会的局限期和广泛期为主。随着肺癌分期手段的进步，分期的准确性进一步提高。大量回顾性的资料表明，早期小细胞肺癌的手术疗效不亚于非小细胞肺癌。而对拟手术的小细胞肺癌的分期也应采用现代更精确的TNM分期。.