1. Why do you need radiotherapy and / or chemotherapy after surgery?
Surgery only removes all or part of the visually visible lesions, while the possible residual tumor tissue and invisible tumor cells need to be removed by chemotherapy and / or radiotherapy. Practice has proved that postoperative adjuvant chemotherapy or radiotherapy for middle and locally advanced lung cancer and some early non-small cell lung cancer can significantly improve the survival time of patients, so appropriate postoperative radiotherapy and chemotherapy can benefit patients the most.
2. what is neoadjuvant radiotherapy and chemotherapy and adjuvant radiotherapy and chemotherapy.Neoadjuvant radiotherapy and chemotherapy refers to systemic chemotherapy or radiotherapy before operation, which aims to reduce the size of the mass and kill invisible metastatic cells as soon as possible, so as to facilitate the follow-up operation. It is suitable for patients who are late in tumor staging, that is, what we call locally advanced patients (the tumor grows larger locally or has tissue invasion and regional lymph node metastasis, but there is still no spread of distant organs), there is still a chance of surgical excision. at this time, through neoadjuvant chemotherapy and radiotherapy, the boundary between tumor shrinking, descending stage, tumor and surrounding normal tissue becomes clear, which is conducive to surgery, or even complete resection. Patients with early tumor can usually be cured by local treatment, and do not need to do new adjuvant chemotherapy and radiotherapy. However, for patients with middle and advanced tumors, they usually do not use new adjuvant chemotherapy and radiotherapy because they have lost the opportunity to cure the tumor. As for adjuvant radiotherapy and chemotherapy, it refers to the adjuvant therapy after operation, which is simply understood as "consolidation therapy" after operation for patients whose tumors are larger than or whose postoperative pathological biopsy reports indicate that they have local infiltration, regional lymph node metastasis or high malignant degree of the tumor, they need adjuvant radiotherapy and chemotherapy after operation, which can eliminate the remaining micrometastatic lesions, reduce the chance of tumor recurrence and metastasis, and improve the cure rate. Finally, it achieves the effect of "1x 1 > 2".
