Seventeen years of surgical treatment of thymoma: factors influencing survival

Abstract

We report on 17 years experience of the surgical treatment of thymoma in65 patients, 11 with and 54 without myasthenia gravis. Patients were stagedusing the French "GETT" classification; 38 were in stage I (no invasivetumor), 6 in stage II, 13 in stage III and 8 in stage IV. In 45 patients,surgical excision was total while the remaining 20 underwent partialresection only. Postoperative radiotherapy was given in 12 cases, and 17received a combination of radiotherapy and chemotherapy. One patient waslost to follow up, but no operative death occurred in the series. The meansurvival for all patients was 70 +/- 7 months, and the 5- and 10-yearsurvival was 91% +/- 4% and 69% +/- 8%, respectively. Follow-up for the 47patients still alive and 4 patients deceased from unrelated causes rangedfrom 1.5 to 180 months (mean 142 +/- 10 months). Our data indicate that theprognosis of thymoma relates to radiological discovery (P less than 0.01),total surgical resection (P less than 0.01) and stage of tumor (P less than0.01). It is not influenced by age, sex, tumor cell type or the presence orabsence of myasthenia gravis.