Clinical features and post-surgical outcome of patients with astroblastoma

Astroblastoma is a rare tumor, and thus experience with these lesions is very limited. The prognosis and appropriate treatment is not well understood, as few individual centers have enough experience with astroblastoma to guide treatment recommendations. We performed a systematic comprehensive search of the published English language literature on patients undergoing surgery for astroblastoma to summarize what is known about these tumors, and to provide some framework for future efforts in this area. A total of 62 references met our inclusion criteria, and contained individual patient data on 116 patients with astroblastoma. Determination of overall survival rates was performed using Kaplan-Meier analysis. This analysis suggests that the distribution is bimodal, with a prominent peak in young adulthood. Astroblastomas are generally amenable to complete tumor resection, even when very large, with gross total resection (GTR) achieved in 71/85 (84%) of reported patients, including both 9cm tumors reported. Patients undergoing GTR experienced a significant improvement in survival compared to patients who underwent subtotal resection (STR) (5-year progression-free survival: GTR 83% versus [vs.] STR 55%, log rank p=0.011). Although patients receiving external beam radiotherapy or fractionated three-dimensional conformal radiotherapy (XRT) seemed to have lower survival rates, this was not statistically significant (5-year survival: GTR 94% vs. GTR+XRT 73%, log rank p=0.463). Thus, we have reported the results of a summary of the literature on astroblastomas and have accurately described outcome characteristics using a data set that would be difficult to accumulate at a single center treating this tumor.