Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 12, 2026
Longitudinal Intravital Imaging of Brain Tumor Cell Behavior in Response to an Invasive Surgical Biopsy
Published on: May 3, 2019
Surgical treatment of neuroblastoma: twenty-three years of experience at a single institution
A I Koivusalo1, M P Pakarinen, R J Rintala
1Children's Hospital, University of Helsinki and Helsinki University Central Hospital, Helsinki, Finland, antti.koivusalo@hus.fi.
Purpose:
Neuroblastoma (NB) is treated with surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. We assessed the effects of surgical resection on the outcome over a 23-year period at our institution.
Methods:
85 children were included with a median age at diagnosis of 2.0 (range 0.1-15) years. We assessed the correlation of the complete surgical resection (CR) rate, metastases, NMYC amplification (NMYCA) and chemotherapeutic response with the 5-year overall survival (OS).
Results:
The INSS stage of NB was 1 in 11 (13 %) patients, 2 in 10 (11 %), 3 in 13 (17 %), 4 in 46 (53 %) and 4S in five patients (6 %). Fifty-two (61 %) patients had high-risk NB and 22 (26 %) had NMYCA. The resection was complete in 72 (85 %) patients, incomplete (ICR) in seven (8 %) and six (7 %) patients did not undergo surgery. Fifty-five patients were administered neoadjuvant and 61 were administered adjuvant chemotherapy (high-dose, n = 50). The OS (5 year) was 68 %: stage 1 (100 %), 2 (90 %), 3 (77 %), 4 (52 %), 4S (80 %) and high-risk NB (52 %). The OS in high-risk NB patients was correlated with a good chemotherapeutic response of the primary tumour, with a RR for mortality = 0.3 (95 % CI 0.1-0.7; p = 0.01), but not with the CR, which had an RR = 0.9 (95 % CI 0.3-2.4; p = 0.84).
Conclusions:
The OS in high-risk NB patients was related to a good histological chemotherapeutic response, but not with complete excision of the primary tumour.
