Gliomatosis cerebri

PubMed, the internet portal of biomedical and life sciences literature, indexed an interesting stady, entitled “Gliomatosis cerebri: a review of 296 cases from the ANOCEF database and the literature” (J Neurooncol. 2005 Sep 10). Authors are Taillibert S, Chodkiewicz C, Laigle-Donadey F et al., from the Federation de Neurologie, Groupe hospitalier Pitie-Salpetriere, Paris, France. Gliomatosis cerebri (GC) is a rare disease, defined as a diffuse neoplastic glial cell infiltration of the brain. Diagnosis and management of GC are difficult. This study analyzed 296 individual cases. Male population was younger had a higher incidence of oligodendroglial GC, which may explain their better prognosis than female population. Despite a high rate of stabilization, the impact on survival of whole brain radiotherapy, which carries the risk of severe toxicity, is still unclear. Up-front chemotherapy benefit to some patients and may be prefered to whole brain radiotherapy. However, the many bias of such retrospective heterogeneous data claim for multicentric clinical trials in this rare disease. To access the full abstract of the text study, click here.