A plea for thoracoscopic resection of solitary pulmonary nodule in cancer patients.

In this series, only 50% of SPN in patients with known malignant disease were pulmonary metastases and 25% had a newly diagnosed NSCLC. Smoking was associated with primary lung cancer but no other predictor was found to allow the distinction between pulmonary metastasis and lung cancer. These results endorse the need of histological confirmation of SPN in patients with previous malignancies to avoid diagnostic uncertainty and suboptimal treatments.