Complications after pulmonary exeresis for cancer: Predictivity of functional respiratory indexes

The authors retrospectively studied smoking habit, age and respiratory functional indexes with respect to the probability of complications in 344 patients who underwent pulmonary exeresis for cancer from 1988 to 1993. Statistic analysis (analysis of variance, Chi square test and discriminant analysis) was carried out in order to find differences between patient's with and without complications. With the Chi square test the functional indexes over and under prefixed cutoff (as in the literature) of patient's with and without complications were analyzed. On the basis of discriminant analysis, we tried to carry out a multifactorial analysis in order to evaluate the predictive power of the indexes which we had formerly examined individually. The model with the highest predictive power (75%) included: FEVO.5, PaO2, TLCO/VA%, PaCO2, RV/TLC.