ABSTRACT
At the time of clinical diagnosis, non-small-cell lung cancer is already a systemic disease in a proportion of cases. This has been shown by studies of the frequency of residual and metastatic disease found in autopsies of patients who died within 30 days of curative resection, and by the pattern of failure following curative surgery for Stage one and two disease. Attempts to control the growth of minimal residual disease have led to a variety of adjuvant therapies, tested for efficacy in controlled, prospectively randomized clinical trials. The method of analysis used is Meta-analysis. It is the statistical process of combining the results of several studies. The majority of trials to be examined have used the drug cyclophosphamide as an adjuvant therapy for lung cancer. When an adjuvant treatment is compared to a control arm in a prospectively randomized trial one may expect to see one of three outcomes.
