Authors present actual overview of informations on diagnostic and therapeutic procedures in small cell lung cancer (SCLC). This highly aggressive type of lung cancer is diagnosed in 14.8 % of Czech lung cancer patients.
Vast ma-jority of those patients, (87 %) suffer from advanced and metastatic disease in the time of diagnosis. In this issue are presented prognostic factors, staging diagnostic procedures and therapeutic recommendations.
The backbone of actual SCLC treatment is combined chemotherapy and radiotherapy and less frequently, carefully in selected cases, surgical procedures. SCLC should be have as chemosensitive, chemoresistent or chemorefracto-ry disease.
Actual cytostatic combinations used in 1 st line treatment, different schedules of chemoradiotherapy, drugs used in second line treatment and schedules and timing of prophylactic brain irradiation are presented. In near future, perspectively, there are some promissible data on antitumour immunotherapy based on anti CTLA-4 and anti PD-1/PE-L1 antibodies also in SCLC patients, or on dendritic cells modified vaccines.