Brain metastasis from prostate carcinoma: antemortem recognition and outcome after treatment

In patients with prostate carcinoma, brain metastasis has most commonly been reported in autopsy series. Symptomatic brain metastasis from prostate carcinoma has occasionally been detected.

The authors retrospectively studied a series of 38 patients with antemortem intracerebral metastasis found on review of 7994 patients treated over an 18-year period at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.

The mean time from diagnosis of prostate carcinoma to discovery of brain metastasis was 28 months, with a mean survival of 9.2 months after the discovery of the brain metastasis. The brain metastasis was treated only with whole brain irradiation in 29 patients, with craniotomy and irradiation in 8 patients, and with surgery alone in 1 patient. Small cell carcinomas and primary transitional cell carcinomas of the prostate were much more likely to produce brain metastasis than were adenocarcinomas. Also noted among the overall prostate carcinoma cohort was a second group of 16 patients with prostate carcinoma and brain metastasis that had developed from a second primary tumor, which in all was either lung carcinoma or melanoma.

The occurrence of brain metastasis in prostate carcinoma patients is rare, usually signifies a late stage of the disease, and may in some patients be produced by a tandem extraprostatic tumor.