Genomic alterations and survival in young patients aged under 40 years with completely resected non-small cell lung cancer

Abstract

Background: Young patients are rarely diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), and little is known about its predisposing genomic alterations and survival. Methods: This retrospective study was conducted to evaluate the genomic alterations, treatment and prognosis of young patients under 40 years old from a cohort of 640 lung adenocarcinoma and squamous carcinoma cases from Zhejiang Cancer Hospital. All patients were examined for EGFR, KRAS, NRAS, PIK3CA, BRAF and HER2 mutations and ALK, ROS1 and RET fusion genes. Results: In total, 54 patients were aged under 40 years. The frequencies of genomic alterations in younger (≤40 years) and older (>40 years) patients were 68.5% and 54.8%, respectively (P=0.05). Younger patients harbored a higher frequency of fusion genes (22.2% vs. 4.1%, P<0.001) but not gene mutations (46.3% vs. 45.6%, P=0.92). There was a general trend toward shorter recurrence-free survival (RFS) (35.2 vs. 43.8 months, P=0.050), while no overall survival (OS) difference existed between younger and older patients (50.2 vs. 51.4 months, P=0.112). Conclusions: Younger patients with NSCLC had a higher frequency of gene fusions than older patients and had a trend of worse OS.