Backgrounds: The Naples Prognostic Score (NPS) emerges as a novel prognostic scoring system in surgical oncology. We aim to assess the prognostic significance of preoperative NPS in patients undergoing completely video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) lobectomy for early-stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) by propensity score matching (PSM) analysis.
Methods: The present study was conducted on our single-center prospectively maintained database between January 2014 and December 2015. A Kaplan-Meier survival analysis using the log-rank test was used to distinguish differences in both overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS) between the patients stratified by preoperative NPS. Finally, multivariable Cox-proportional hazards regression analysis and PSM analysis were carried out to determine the independent prognostic factors for both OS and DFS.
Results: There were 457 patients with operable primary stage I-II NSCLC included. Per 1-point increase in NPS was found to be significantly associated with unfavorable OS and DFS of NSCLC. Both OS and DFS were significantly shortened along with each number increase in the NPS group, showing a step-wise fashion. Such strong correlations between preoperative NPS and survival outcomes still remained validated after PSM analysis. In addition, NPS held the best discriminatory power for predicting both OS and DFS when compared to the other peripheral biomarkers. Multivariable analyses on the entire cohort and the PSM cohort demonstrated that preoperative NPS could be an independent prognostic indicator for both OS and DFS.
Conclusions: The NPS scoring system can serve as a novel risk stratification tool to refine prognostic prediction after VATS lobectomy for surgically resected NSCLC.
Keywords: Naples prognostic score; Non-small cell lung cancer; Video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery.