DOI: 10.1159/000235544 Mediastinal Lymph Node Staging in Potentially

tive comparative study, and underwent EUS/EUS-FNA. Re-sults: Pathological N-stage was established in 78 patients, while in another 2 cases, malignant pleural effusion was proven by EUS-FNA, and we avoided further N-staging. In the 78 patients, the prevalence of malignant mediastinal LNs was 21%. The accuracy of EUS/EUS-FNA (91%) was signifi-cantly higher than that of CT (71%). The negative predictive value of EUS/EUS-FNA was 90%. In addition, EUS-FNA identi-fied 2 patients as N3 disease in 56 patients without medias-tinal LN involvement on CT. Conclusions: EUS/EUS-FNA gave more accurate N-staging in patients with possibly resectable NSCLC than CT, and is thus considered to be useful to deter-mine the optimal treatment strategy. Copyright © 2009 S. Karger AG, Basel The annual incidence of lung cancer is more than 1 million worldwide, and it is now the most common ma-lignancy in Japan as well as in Western countries. Medi-astinal lymph node (LN) involvement is reported to be present in about one-third of those cases at the time of initial diagnosis, and a mediastinal LN staging (N-stag-ing) of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is very im-portant in choosing the treatment course [1–3]. CT is th