Clinicopathological characteristics and treatment outcome in small cell lung cancer: A single institutional experience from India

Background and objectives: Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) constitutes 14%-20% of all lung cancers. Clinical data on SCLC are scarce in literature. To report clinical features and treatment outcome of SCLC treated at our center.

Materials and methods: This is a single institutional data review of SCLC patients treated between June 2011 and December 2018. Patients were staged as either localized or extensive disease after appropriate staging work-up. Patients with localized disease were treated with concurrent chemoradiation with platinum-based chemotherapy. Those with extensive disease were treated with platinum based palliative chemotherapy. Clinicopathological characteristics, treatment details, and outcome were recorded in this study. Patients who received at least one cycle of chemotherapy were included for survival analysis as intent-to-treat analysis.

Results: A total of 181 were patients registered with a median age of 62 years (range: 35-86 years) and male: female ratio of 166:15. Eighty-seven percent (n = 157) of patients had smoking history and 15% (n = 28) of patients had symptom of superior vena cava obstruction at baseline. Twenty-seven (15%) patients had localized disease at presentation. One hundred and twenty (66%) patients took systemic chemotherapy. Chemotherapy regimen was carboplatin only in 9 (7%), etoposide-carboplatin in 54 (45%), and cisplatin-etoposide in 57 (48%). Patients received median cycle number of 6 (range: 1-6). Of the evaluable 87 (73%) patients, initial response was complete response in 4, partial response in 57, stable disease in 20, and progressive disease in 6. Twenty patients received second-line chemotherapy at time of disease progression. After a median follow-up of 8.8 months (range: 0.3-46.1), median progression-free survival (PFS) of the whole population was 9.3 months.

Conclusions: Small cell carcinoma in our series had a high incidence of advanced stage (85%) and 13% of patients were nonsmoker. Only 66% of patients received palliative chemotherapy and achieved high disease control rate (>75%) in the evaluable patients with median PFS of 9.3 months.