Materials and Methods: We retrospectively evaluated the patients that we performed pneumonectomy owing to lung cancer from January 2009 to December 2014. Classical and extended pneumonectomies due to non-small cell lung carcinoma were included in the study while excluding the patients who have given neoadjuvant chemotherapy and radiotherapy. We analyzed patients for age, gender, complaints, symptoms, diagnostic steps, pathological specifics, postoperative complications, and surveys.

Results: We evaluated 192 patients retrospectively. The mean age was 58 years. Eight of these patients were female and 184 of them were male. The most common complaint was shortness of breath. We operated 55 patients on right and 137 patients on the left hemithorax. 45 patients were given both chemotherapy and radiotherapy, 79 patients only chemotherapy, 2 patients only radiotherapy, and 66 patients did not take any additional treatment. During the follow-up period, we determined metastases in 15 patients, recurrence in 20 patients, and a second primer tumor in 1 patient. The most common postoperative complication was empyema with fistula. The mean hospital stay was 13 days. 5 years of survival was 35.9%.

Conclusions: The five-year overall survival found to be significantly higher compared to the literature. Despite its unwilling morbidity rate and high mortality rate, pneumonectomy is a surgery to prolong survival in selected cases of lung cancer. Keywords : lung cancer, pneumonectomy, survival