Benignant and malignant epidemiology among surgical resections for suspicious solitary lung cancer without preoperative tissue diagnosis

The aim of this study was to describe the epidemiology of patients undergoing diagnostic and/or curative surgical pulmonary resections for lung opacities suspected of being localized primary lung cancers without preoperative tissue confirmation. We performed a single-centre retrospective study of a prospectively implemented institutional database of all patients who underwent pulmonary resection between January 2010 and December 2020. Patients were selected when surgery complied with the Fleischner society guidelines. We performed a multivariable logistic regression to determine the preoperative variables associated with malignancy. Among 1392 patients, 213 (15.3%) had a final diagnosis of benignancy. We quantified futile parenchymal resections in 29 (2.1%) patients defined by an anatomical resection of >2 lung segments for benign lesions that did not modified the clinical management. Compared with patients with malignancies, patients with benignancies were younger (57.5 vs 63.9 years, P