Background: Current guidelines for NSCLC follow-up lack specific recommendations on surveillance duration. This study aims to analyze survival and surveillance data in resected stage I NSCLC. Methods: We retrospectively reviewed 759 pathological stage I NSCLC (9thTNM ed.) patients with no history of lung cancer (LC) undergoing surgery from January 2003 to December 2018. Overall survival (OS), incidence of relapse (IR), and incidence of new primary LC (NP) were analyzed. Long-term effect of follow-up beyond 5 years was assessed by landmark analysis of OS, IR, and NP at 10 years, restricted to individuals alive without relapse or NP at 5 years (5-year event-free survivors, 5y-EFSs). Results: The rates of 10-year OS, 10-year IR, NP incidence, and 5y-EFSs were, respectively, 75%, 18%, 1.1%/year, and 59.1% (449 patients). Carcinoid IA/IB (0–10%) and adenocarcinoma IA/IB without lung nodules (LNs) (8–12%) had a similarly lower risk of relapse (p = 0.5088) compared to adenocarcinoma with LNs (p = 0.0191). Similarly, carcinoid (0–0.2%/year) and adenocarcinoma without LNs (0-0.3%/year) had the same lower incidence of NP (p = 0.8062) compared to patients with LNs (p < 0.0001). The group of 5y-EFSs had a conditional 10-year OS, IR, and NP incidence of 92%, 5%, and 0.8%/year. In 5y-EFSs, 10-year OS was better in carcinoid (100%) and adenocarcinoma (94%, p = 0.0009) patients; 10-year IR was lower in stage IA (4%) vs. IB (10%, p = 0.0444), and NP was lower in patients with no pre-surgery (0.5 vs. 1.5%/year, p = 0.0147) and no post-surgery LNs (0.6 vs. 1.1%/year, p = 0.0202). Conclusions: Based on our results, we propose a tailored surveillance strategy by de-escalating follow-up for low-risk patients while maintaining intensive monitoring for high-risk individuals.

Objectives: Chronobiology may influence outcomes in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), but its prognostic role in early-stage disease remains unclear. We evaluated the association between perioperative chronobiological variables, systemic inflammation, and long-term outcomes after complete resection for stage I NSCLC. Methods: 587 patients who underwent curative-intent resection for pathological stage I NSCLC between 2009 and 2018 were retrospectively reviewed. Chronobiological and inflammatory variables included season of surgery (spring/summer [21st March–22nd September], autumn/winter [23rd September–20th March]), time of day, day of week, and preoperative (CRP0 levels: low ≤ 3 mg/L, high > 3 mg/L) and postoperative day-3 (CRP3 levels: low ≤ 126 mg/L, high > 126 mg/L) C-reactive protein levels. The cohort was randomly divided into training (70%) and testing (30%) sets to develop and validate a prognostic model for overall survival (OS), taking into consideration the follow-up time. Disease-free survival (DFS) was analyzed as a secondary endpoint. Results: Median follow-up was 6.7 years, with 80 deaths and 108 recurrences recorded. In the training set, older age (p = 0.0049), stage IB disease (p = 0.0301), high CRP0 (p = 0.0049), and high CRP3 (p = 0.0280) were associated with worse OS, while surgery performed during autumn/winter was associated with improved OS (p = 0.0312). The multivariate Cox model including age, stage, and season of surgery showed the best prognostic performance (C-index 0.67, 95% Bonferroni-adjusted CI 0.50–0.83) and was internally validated in the testing cohort (C-index 0.69, 95%CI 0.52–0.86). The resulting linear predictor remained associated with both OS and DFS in the overall population. Conclusions: A simple model integrating age, pathological stage, and season of surgery was associated with long-term outcomes after surgery in stage I NSCLC. This model provides an exploratory framework integrating host-, tumor-, and chronobiological dimensions of prognosis. These findings require external validation and further investigation of the biological mechanisms underlying seasonal variation.

Advances in screening, surgical techniques, perioperative care, and multimodality treatment have progressively expanded the population of long-term survivors with early-stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). However, disease-free survival does not necessarily correspond to complete functional recovery after curative-intent treatment. Many patients continue to experience persistent fatigue, dyspnea, reduced physical activity, impaired exercise tolerance, muscle loss, and deterioration in health-related quality of life despite adequate oncologic control. This narrative review discusses functional recovery as a survivorship endpoint in early-stage NSCLC, focusing on recovery trajectories, physiologic vulnerability, frailty, sarcopenia, rehabilitation, symptom burden, and emerging biologic frameworks such as allostatic load. Increasing evidence suggests that survivorship after NSCLC should not be interpreted exclusively according to recurrence or survival metrics, but also according to the ability to recover physiologic reserve, autonomy, and daily functioning after treatment. Functional recovery appears heterogeneous and influenced by multiple interacting factors, including baseline reserve, systemic inflammation, physical inactivity, behavioral adaptation, and cumulative stress burden. Rehabilitation strategies, structured symptom surveillance, and patient-reported outcomes may help identify vulnerable patients and improve long-term survivorship trajectories. Future survivorship models should probably integrate oncologic outcomes with longitudinal functional assessment to better characterize recovery patterns after treatment.