Survival Rates Shorter for Patients with Multiple Brain Tumor Sites

When aggressive, malignant tumors appear in more than one location in the brain, patient survival tends to be significantly shorter than when the disease begins as a single tumor, even though patients in both cases undergo almost identical treatments, according to new research from the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Research Institute.

“We’ve known that certain independent factors, such as age at diagnosis, amount of residual tumor after surgery and the patient’s functional status, are useful in predicting outcomes in patients with glioblastoma multiforme, but multifocal disease at time of onset has rarely been examined in this context,” says Chirag G. Patil, MD, director of the Center for Neurosurgical Outcomes Research in the Department of Neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. “Two small previous studies were contradictory. Our study appears to confirm observations that disease in patients with more than one lesion is particularly challenging and that these patients tend to have worse outcomes. Matched survival analysis demonstrated that multifocal disease is a strong and negative independent prognostic factor.” For more information, click here to read the full release.