Adjuvant therapy in stage II thymic carcinoma

Purpose The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy on disease-free survival and overall survival for patients with stage II thymic carcinoma. Methods We retrospectively evaluated the outcome of 31 patients with Masaoka stage II thymic carcinoma who were treated between 1995 and 2009 in Zhejiang Cancer Hospital. Survival curves were plotted using the Kaplan-Meier method. The Cox proportional hazard model was used for multivariate analysis. Results Thirty-one patients were included in current study. The most common histological subtypes were squamous cell carcinoma (48.4 %), followed by undifferentiated carcinoma (19.4 %) and neuroendocrine tumor (19.4 %). The 5-year disease-free survival and overall survival rate was 74.6 and 89.5 %, respectively. Univariate and multivariate analysis revealed that radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy did not statistically associated with disease-free survival and overall survival. Conclusion Our result indicated that adjuvant therapy after complete resection could not impact the disease-free survival and overall survival of patients with stage II thymic carcinoma.