Abstract
A correct diagnosis of lung cancer is a prerequisite for effective therapy and its quality needs to be confirmed in clinical practice. Therefore, a retrospective study was conducted in 7 pulmonology centers of Czech university hospitals.
It determined the incidence of lung cancer with respect to patients' gender, age and smoking status, in-vestigated how and how fast diagnoses were made, and assessed the characteristics of identified tumors including genetic tests. The study comprised 730 lung cancer patients consecutively examined from 1 January to 30 June 2016.
In 707 (96.8 %) patients, cancer was identified by micromorphological examination; this comprised cytology tests (12.0 %), histology tests (47.7 %) and both cytology and histology tests (37.1 %). The diagnosis was made using bronchoscopy in 447 (61.2 %) patients, a transthoracic approach in 104 (14.2 %) patients, surgery in 107 (14,7 %) and other tissue sampling in 50 (6.8 %) patients.
The types of cancer were NSCLC in 585 (80.2 %) pa-tients, SCLC in 105 (14.4 %) and others in 20 (2.7 %) patients. Among the NSCLC cases, 318 (43.6 %) had ade-nocarcinoma. 234 (32.1 %) had squamous cell carcinoma. 6 (0.8 %) had large-cell carcinoma and 27 (3.7 %) had NOS types.
In 14.6 % of all EGFR tests. EGFR mutations were identified; ALK positivity was found in 5.3 % of the tested cancer cases.
The median times to results were 14 days and 12 days for EGFR and ALK, respectively.