A Multidisciplinary Approach to Screening, Staging, and Treating NSCLC
At Johns Hopkins Hospital, each specialist in my practice sees approximately 8 to 10 patients with nonmetastatic NSCLC per month, some of whom are not candidates for surgery based on physiologic parameters. In most cases, we follow the NCCN Guidelines or ASCO clinical practice guidelines in our management of patients with early-stage NSCLC, except in clinical scenarios where the patient may not fit into a particular category within the guidelines, or when we enroll a patient in a clinical trial. For example, we may determine that a neoadjuvant clinical study is appropriate for a patient with stage IB NSCLC, whereas this recommendation is not concordant with the NCCN Guidelines. There are also instances in which we apply recently published clinical study data when managing our patients—even before the NCCN Guidelines have been updated to reflect the most recent findings.