Abstract
This work aims to investigate the therapeutic regimen of brain metastatic cancers and the relationship between clinical features and prognosis. Clinical data of 184 patients with brain metastatic cancers were collected and analysed for the relationship between survival time and age, gender, primary diseases, quantity of brain metastatic foci, their position, extra cranial lesions, and therapeutic regimens. The average age of onset was 59.1 years old. The median survival time (MST) was 15.0 months, and the patients with breast cancer as the primary disease had the longest survival time. Females had a longer survival time than males. Patients with meningeal metastasis had extremely short survival time. Those with less than 3 brain metastatic foci survived longer than patients with more than 3. The MST of patients receiving radiotherapy only and the patients receiving chemotherapy only were all 10.0 months while the MST of patients receiving combination therapy was 16.0 months. Multiple COX regression analysis demonstrated that gender, primary diseases, and quantity of brain metastatic foci were independent prognostic factors for brain metastatic cancers. Chemotherapy is as important as radiotherapy in the treatment of brain metastatic cancer. Combination therapy is the best treatment mode. Male gender, brain metastatic cancers originating in the gastrointestinal tract, more than 3 metastatic foci, and involvement of meninges indicate a worse prognosis.
Highlights
Brain metastasis is the most common complication of advanced tumors
Analysis of prognostic factors in brain metastases cancer Analyze the patients’ information basing on general clinical information by Univariate analysis, we found that the female patient survival is slightly better than men, median survival time (MST) were 16.0 months and 13.0 months, but the difference has no statistically significant (χ2 = 2.232, P = 0.135)
Metastatic brain tumors aren’t the malignancy originating from the nerve tissue, but its morbidity is the highest among malignant brain tumors and would be more complicated in treatments compared with the primary tumors in brain (De Angelis et al, 2001)
Summary
Brain metastasis is the most common complication of advanced tumors. There’re about 200,000 new cases only one year in America, which is ten times more than primary intracranial tumors (Patchell, 2003; Gavrilovic et al, 2005). Some reported that brain metastasis might occur in the pathological process of 20-40 percent of patients with malignant tumors (Newton, 1999). Gradual upward trend in recent years may be induced with the longer overall survival of cancer patients since the improving level of comprehensive cancer treatments, as well as more and more asymptomatic brain metastases were diagnosed due to the developed diagnostic imaging techniques (AbdEl-Barr et al, 2011). The prognosis of patients with brain metastases is generally poor, and it would even be about 4 weeks, if without positive treatment (Sundstrom et al, 1998). The treatment of brain metastases, for physicians, cannot be ignored
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