Stereotactic body radiation therapy versus surgery for early stage non-small cell lung cancer: clearing a path through an evolving treatment landscape

An interesting and robust systematic review and meta-analysis comparing outcomes between patients with early stage non-small cell lung cancer (ES-NSCLC) receiving stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) or surgical resection was recently reported by Cao et al. (1). After a thorough examination of studies available in the literature comparing these two modalities, 32 studies were ultimately identified as suitable for study inclusion, including the pooled analysis of the STARS and ROSEL randomized trials (2) and 31 observational studies that included SEER (n=6) and NCDB (n=3) analyses. Twenty-three of these studies were used for quantitative analysis, and the investigators performed a quality assessment of all included studies using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale, indicating an overall moderate quality study score.