Results from a study on the efficacy of radical decortication/pleurectomy for the treatment of mesothelioma were recently released at the 44th annual meeting of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons and they showed the procedure was very successful in the treatment of the disease. The study looked at 127 consecutive patients who presented with stage 3 epithelial mesothelioma at Glenfield Hospital in Leicester, England. It found that the 55 patients who underwent radical decortication/pleurectomy had the best one-year (83%) and two-year (73%) survival rates of all the major surgical procedures used to treat mesothelioma. For the 35 patients who were treated with an extrapleural pneumonectomy, one-year survival was 55% and two-year survival was 18%. Another subgroup of 35 patients underwent vascular access thorosectomy (VATS) decortication/pleurectomy and they had a one-year survival average of 67% and a two-year figure of 22%.

The overall figures from the study showed that long-term survival was not associated with age or with sex, but was determined by the surgical method used.

Labels: mesothelioma