Background: Lung carcinoma is the leading cause of cancer mortality worldwide. Although the 5-year survivalrate nearly tripled from 5-15% over the last 25 years, the estimated number of deaths still exceeds 1.3 millionannually. The overall 5-year survival of lung cancer is only 10% in Europe and 15% in the United States. Theaim of the current study was to determine the long-term survival and the effect of certain prognostic factorson survival of patients with lung cancer in Yazd city, Iran. Methods: In this cross-sectional descriptive study,we retrospectively reviewed hospital records and follow-up data of 148 patients with histological proven lungcancer using the cancer data registered between 1998 and 2005 in the pathology department of Shahid Sadoughieducational hospital, Yazd, Iran. Data were extracted from patient documents that included sex, age, clinicalmanifestations, histopathological report of the tumor and type of treatment given. Results: Overall survivaltime in all patients was 8.5 months after diagnosis and there was no significant difference in survival accordingto sex (p=0.958). Histological analysis revealed that squamous cell carcinoma was the most common histologictype (35%). Kaplan-Meier statistical methods estimated the average survival time for SCC to be better (22.6months) in comparison with the other types of histology (all of them below 10 months). There was a trend towardssignificance between type of histology and duration of survival (p=0.08). Conclusion: It is reasonable to expectthat early lung cancer detection, and appropriated treatment, may improve surgical morbidity and mortality.Low survival of lung cancer in our center patients show our shortages in screening programs for early diagnosis.Designing studies with larger sample size that take some other variables like staging of patients is now necessary.
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