OBJECTIVE Despite technical difficulties due to mediastinal fibrosis, repeat mediastinoscopy can be a valuable tool in the restaging of lung cancer. It provides essential pathological information on mediastinal invasion when selecting patients for surgical resection after induction chemotherapy in stage IIIa disease. The aim of our study was to evaluate the feasibility, sensitivity and accuracy...

OBJECTIVE Mediastinoscopy is a common procedure used for the diagnosis of thoracic disease and the staging of lung cancer. We sought to determine the current role of mediastinoscopy in the evaluation of thoracic disease. METHODS We conducted a retrospective review of all mediastinoscopies performed by members of our service between January 1988 and September 1998. RESULTS We performed media...

CONTEXT With the advent of modern anatomical and functional imaging technologies, application of cervical mediastinoscopy has decreased in diagnosis and staging of mediastinal diseases. AIM To evaluate the usefulness of cervical mediastinoscopy in assessing the mediastinal disease when imaging modalities are non-diagnostic. SETTINGS AND DESIGN Retrospective analysis of records of a tertiary...

Staging is an essential part of the work-up of a patient presenting with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). It is impossible to decide which treatment is appropriate for an individual patient without information regarding tumor extension, regional lymph node metastases and distant metastases. The ability to assess mediastinal involvement is important since the presence of pathologic mediastina...

A 69-year-old man with a moderately well differentiated squamous-cell carcinoma of the lung, underwent a mediastinoscopy. All histological examinations of the mediastinal nodes were negative. The patient was treated with a curative left pneumonectomy. Three months after this negative mediastinoscopy the patient developed a metastasis in the mediastinoscopy scar. A report of this case and a revi...

PURPOSE To identify the optimal strategy for staging the mediastinum of patients with known non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), stratified by tumor (T) classification. METHODS We used a decision-analytic model to compare the health outcomes and cost-effectiveness of three staging strategies: (1) chest computed tomography alone, (2) selective mediastinoscopy, and (3) routine mediastinoscopy. T...

Mediastinoscopy is a diagnostic procedure, which was first described by Carlens in 1959. Despite the availability of sophisticated imaging techniques (e.g. positron emission tomography), mediastinoscopy remains essential in the staging of lung cancer because of its high sensitivity (.80%) and specificity (100%). Other indications for mediastinoscopy include biopsy of mediastinal masses especial...

BACKGROUND Mediastinoscopy is a good method to evaluate mediastinal lesions. We sought to determine the current role of mediastinoscopy in the investigation of non-lung cancer patients with mediastinal lymphadenopathy. MATERIALS AND METHODS We retrospectively reviewed clinical parameters (age, gender, histological diagnosis, morbidity, mortality) of all patients without lung cancer who consec...