Aim: We assessed risk factors for bone metastasis in patients with completely resected non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC).
Materials & methods: A total of 374 NSCLC patients who had undergone a complete resection from January 2008 to May 2012 were included in this retrospective study. The Kaplan-Meier method and multivariate Cox regression analysis were used to evaluate risk factors for bone metastasis.
Results: A total of 47 (47/374; 12.6%) patients developed bone metastasis up until the last follow-up time. The patients with bone metastasis included 33 adenocarcinoma patients and 6 (4.9%) squamous cell carcinoma patients (p = 0.001). There were 17 (10.2%) patients with pathological stage (P-stage) I disease, 9 (9.5%) patients with P-stage II disease and 21 (18.8%) patients with P-stage III disease (p = 0.007) among all the bone metastasis patients. For patients without or with bone metastasis, the overall survival ratio at 3 years was 71.6% compared with 46.8% (p < 0.0001), respectively.
Conclusion: Adenocarcinoma and P-stage III disease were related to a high risk of bone metastasis.
Keywords: bone metastasis; non-small-cell lung cancer; risk factors.