Survival of high grade glioma patients depends on their age at diagnosis.
BACKGROUND
Although the prognosis for malignant gliomas is normally dismal, it's not infrequent in neurooncologist's experience to find cases with unusually prolonged survival. In order to understand what factors influence survival of high grade glioma patients, a cohort of 196 high (III-IV) grade glioma patients was investigated for possible association between (1) survival and age at diagnosis; (2) survival and micronuclei in tumor tissue; (3) survival and gender; (4) micronuclei in tumor tissue and age at diagnosis.


RESULTS
Patients diagnosed at an older age (>64 years) had a significantly higher hazard as compared to younger patients (<or=64 years), indicating that older patients survived shorter. On the contrary, no association was found between survival and micronuclei or gender.


METHODS
Survival analysis was performed by the Cox' proportional hazards regression model.


CONCLUSIONS
Age at diagnosis, together with other established prognostic factors such as histologic characteristics, extent of surgery and Karnofsky Performance Score may to a certain extent predict survival of high grade glioma patients.
Casartelli
Gianluigi
G
Molecular Mutagenesis and DNA Repair, Istituto Nazionale Ricerca Cancro, Genova, Italy.
Dorcaratto
Alessandra
A
Ravetti
Jean Louis
JL
Sola
Simona
S
Vitali
Alessandro
A
Merlo
Domenico Franco
DF
Frosina
Guido
G
D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D043171:Chromosomal Instability; D015331:Cohort Studies; D005260:Female; D005910:Glioma / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000235:genetics*; D006801:Humans; D007558:Italy; D053208:Kaplan-Meier Estimate; D008297:Male; D015162:Micronucleus Tests / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D008875:Middle Aged; D011379:Prognosis; D016016:Proportional Hazards Models