Search

Abstract Introduction Neurosurgery is considered the mainstay of treatment for pediatric low‐grade glioma (LGG); the extent of resection determines subsequent stratification in current treatment protocols. Yet, surgical radicality must be balanced against the risks of complications that may affect long‐term quality of life. We investigated whether this consideration impacted surgical resection patterns over time for patients of the German LGG studies. Patients and Methods Four thousand two hundred and seventy pediatric patients from three successive LGG studies (median age at diagnosis 7.6 years, neurofibromatosis (NF1) 14.7%) were grouped into 5 consecutive time intervals (TI1‐5) for date of diagnosis and analyzed for timing and extent of first surgery with respect to tumor site, histology, NF1‐status, sex, and age. Results The fraction of radiological LGG diagnoses increased over time (TI1 12.6%; TI5 21.7%), while the extent of the first neurosurgical intervention (3440/4270) showed a reduced fraction of complete/subtotal and an increase of partial resections from TI1 to TI5. Binary logistic regression analysis for the first intervention within the first year following diagnosis confirmed the temporal trends (p

Abstract Background The prognosis of patients with recurrences from stage 4 neuroblastoma is not uniformly dismal. The evaluation of new therapies therefore needs to consider the individual risks of the treated patients. This study aims to define clinically useful risk criteria. Patients and Methods Inclusion criteria were: first recurrence of neuroblastoma stage 4 aged ≥18 months and enrollment in first line trials between 1997 and 2016. Patients were randomized into a training set (N = 310) and an independent validation set (N = 159). The primary endpoint was secondary event‐free survival. The individual treatment elements the patients received during initial and recurrent disease were analyzed as binary and time‐dependent variables. A five‐step multiple time‐dependent Cox regression analysis was performed on the training set to identify prognostic variables adjusted for the individual frontline treatment. The selected variables resulted in a prognostic index (PI) and were used to build a risk score system. The score was validated with the validation set. Results Of the 469 patients, 372 were treated with curative intent and 97 with palliative intent. The PI included the variables number of recurrence organs (hazard ratio [HR] = 2.27), time to recurrence (HR = 2.03), liver metastasis at diagnosis (HR = 1.77), first recurrence at site of the primary tumor (HR = 1.55), and age (HR = 1.29). Three risk groups were built and confirmed in the validation set. The scoring system was likewise useful for the curatively or palliatively treated subgroups. Conclusion A new risk score system for patients with first recurrence of stage 4 neuroblastoma aged ≥18 months at diagnosis is proposed.