Abstract
Surgical resection, driven by good results in terms of survival, has gained an increasingly important role in the approach to the patient with lung metastases.
Thoracoscopy, although less invasive and permitting a faster recovery of the patient, has been the subject of some dispute due to lake of safe removal of very small nodules and detection of cold nodules (undetected on image exams). This could be surpassed by applying single port- video assisted thoracic surgery(SP-VATS).
The authors present the results of SP-VATS in the treatment of 24 patients with lung metastases in terms of hospital stay, pain, number of resected nodes, lymph node dissection and pathological results. We also compared the number of nodes detected preoperatively on image exams with the number of nodes resected and the pathogical results.
Of these 24 patients the vast majority were female (70.8%) with a mean age of 55.2 years. Most of the metastases originated from the digestive tract (75%). The average time of surgery was 92 minutes. In 37.5% cases (9 patients) we resected more nodes than were detected by CT and / or PET preoperatively and of these about 55% were positive in pathological examination.
The use of SP-VATS allows to fill the gaps left by thoracoscopy in the treatment of lung metastases maintaining its advantages. Ensures a faster recovery and is less painful for patients. It allows the detection of cold nodules as small as 2mm and a complete lymph node dissection. In our opinion it should be the preferred technique in treating this type of pathology.
- Copyright ©the authors 2016
