Postoperative complications and its relationship with the severity of postoperative pain in patients undergoing thoracic surgery

Aim: To investigate the complications that occur in our patients who underwent thoracic surgery, as well as the relationship between postoperative pain and complications. Method: Of the 117 patients who underwent surgery between January 2018 and December 2018, there were 99 patients with pain and the other parameters whose data’s were complete. Medical records of the patients were investigated in terms of age, gender, smoking status and frequency, diagnosis, treatment, length of stay in the hospital, postoperative complications and visual analog scale (VAS). The postoperative complications and VAS values were compared statistically. Results: The mean age of the patients was 50.52±18.46 years, 26 (26.3%) patients were female and 73 (73.7%) were male. The average length of stay in hospital was 4.08±3.06 days and average pain severity was 3.92±2.07. The most common diagnosis in our cases was lung cancer, and the most common complication was prolonged air leakage. There was a significant relationship between the severity of pain and the presence of postoperative complications in our patients (p=0.001). However, the correlation relationship was found to be low (r=0.322). Conclusion: The results of our study revealed that optimal postoperative pain control is an important factor for preventing postoperative complications

Surgical treatment of bronchlectasis: clinical characteristics and long-term outcomes

Background: This study aims to determine the clinical characteristics of the patients with bronchiectasis and evaluate the long-term outcomes of surgery

Prognostic stratification of patients with T3N1M0 non-small cell lung cancer: which phase should it be?

In the 1997 revision of the TNM staging system for lung cancer, patients with T3N0M0 disease were moved from stage IIIA to stage IIB since these patients have a better prognosis. Despite this modification, the local lymph node metastasis remained the most important prognostic factor in patients with lung cancer. The present study aimed to evaluate the prognosis of patients with T3N1 disease as compared with that of patients with stages IIIA and IIB disease. During 7-year period, 313 patients with non-small cell lung cancer (297 men, 16 women) who had resection were enrolled. The patients were staged according the 2007 revision of Lung Cancer Staging by American Joint Committee on Cancer. The Kaplan-Meier statistics was used for survival analysis, and comparisons were made using Cox proportional hazard method. The 5-year survival of patients with stage IIIA disease excluding T3N1 patients was 40%, whereas the survival of the patients with stage IIB disease was 66% at 5 years. The 5-year survival rates of stage III T3N1 patients (single-station N1) was found to be higher than those of patients with stage IIIA disease (excluding pT3N1 patients, P = 0.04), while those were found to be similar with those of patients with stage IIB disease (P = 0.4). Survival of the present cohort of patients with T3N1M0 disease represented the survival of IIB disease rather than IIIA non-small cell lung cancer. Further studies are needed to suggest further revisions in the recent staging system regarding T3N1MO disease