MONTREAL — Quitting smoking before lung surgery is a good thing, but doing it too soon before the procedure might not be, a researcher said here.

In a single-institution cohort, patients who quit smoking within a month of their thoracoscopic lobectomy to treat lung cancer had more complications than those with a longer time off tobacco and those who had never smoked, according to Elisabeth Dexter, MD, of Roswell Park Cancer Center in Buffalo.

They even did worse than patients who kept smoking, Dexter reported at the annual CHEST meeting here.

Previous studies on the effect of smoking cessation on outcomes have reported on patients undergoing thoracotomy, Dexter told MedPage Today, but minimally invasive procedures have changed the playing field by reducing pulmonary complications.

“We wanted to see if, above that factor, smoking cessation could impact the perioperative outcome of those patients,” she said.To investigate, she and colleagues conducted a retrospective analysis of prospectively collected data on 685 patients who had thoracoscopic lobectomy between October 2008 and July 2014, looking at the rate of perioperative complications.

Read More – Source: Quitting Cigarettes Before Surgery Risky | Medpage Today

by Michael Smith
North American Correspondent, MedPage Today