Optimising treatment for post-operative lung cancer recurrence.

Surgical treatment offers the best chances for long-term survival in patients with primary nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC). However, long-term survival after surgery remains less than 50%, mostly due to a 30–77% rate of tumour recurrence. Unlike the distant type of recurrence that is treated nonsurgically in the vast majority of patients, local or loco-regional recurrence, which occurs in 4.6–24% of patients after complete resection (∼80% of cases in the first 2 years) [1], raises several concerns related to the optimal therapeutic approach.