Original articleGeneral thoracicThe Society of Thoracic Surgeons General Thoracic Surgery Database: Establishing Generalizability to National Lung Cancer Resection Outcomes
Section snippets
Material and Methods
Records for patients undergoing lung resections with a diagnosis of lung cancer were extracted from the NIS data sets and the STS GTDB for the years 2002 to 2008. The University of Virginia Institutional Review Board exempted this study from review because it was not human subjects research owing to the lack of discrete patient identifiers and because the analyzed data were not exclusively collected for research purposes.
Results
A total of 19,903 patients were identified within the GTDB, and 246,469 patient records were extracted from the NIS (Table 1). Median patient age was similar in both databases (GTDB, 67 years; NIS, 68 years). Each database included a nearly equal number of men and women undergoing lung cancer resection. Among major comorbid disease states, nearly half of all patients presented with a preoperative history of hypertension, with a slightly higher prevalence among patients represented in the GTDB
Comment
The present study represents an important comparison of primary lung cancer resection rates and outcomes as reported within the STS GTSDB and the NIS. Our results demonstrate significant differences in patient-level data, procedure-level data, and outcomes between samples of the United States general thoracic surgical patient population between two leading clinical and administrative databases. Although the trend in the number of lung cancer resections captured within the NIS remained
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