How can intrathoracic lymphatic involvement be assessed using mediastinoscopy in primary bronchial cancer

In order to achieve mediastinal lymph node staging in bronchial cancer, axial mediastinoscopy (combined with left anterior mediastinoscopy for cancers of the left upper lobe) is by far the most efficient and the most reliable technique. Since mediastinoscopy has been part of the investigations that can be made before thoracotomy, the number of exploratory thoracotomies has considerably decreased in all teams, thus reducing at the same time intraoperative mortality. Thoracic CT, which arrived in the diagnostic weaponry for lung cancer a long time after mediastinoscopy, has a major asset in that it allows selecting the patients for whom mediastinoscopy seems to be useful, on the basis of criteria related to the size of mediastinal lymph nodes (10 mm generally being the threshold chosen to perform mediastinoscopy or not). For almost all authors, systematic mediastinoscopy is no longer useful. Similarly, a positive mediastinoscopy must not lead to systematically refuse patients, as the invasion or absence of invasion of a mediastinal lymph node is neither necessary nor sufficient to discuss a surgical indication. While some still automatically refuse all patients with positive mediastinoscopy, most authors still remain very interventionistic for N2 patients selected on very accurate criteria that are analyzed above. Surgery can then be performed at once or, for some authors, after a "neo-adjunctive" therapy, the long-term efficacy of which has unfortunately not been rigorously demonstrated as yet.