Comprehensive analysis of Iranian reports of pediatric central nervous system tumors

Iran lacks a national registry reporting the data of central nervous system (CNS) tumors in children. Consequently, treatment success and failure rates are unknown, and a centralized system for disease-management recommendations does not exist.

To critically evaluate the current state of pediatric CNS tumor studies and reporting in Iran, we performed an extensive retrospective analysis of all known reports identified with multiple search engines.

Of 409 initially retrieved articles, we evaluated 123 matching our inclusion criteria. We further narrowed these reports to 74 by excluding studies pertaining to adult patients only, non-CNS tumors, or brain metastases. We also excluded studies that were performed outside of Iran or that did not contain relevant data from our analysis. We divided the remaining studies into those describing exclusively pediatric patients (3484 patients) and those describing mixed populations of adults and children (18,641 patients). In total, our analysis included 22,125 patients.

We identified many limitations in the reporting of studies describing the treatment or prevalence of CNS tumors in children in Iran. Our results may guide future efforts in Iran to improve the care for children with CNS tumors and may provide a valuable template for other comprehensive country- and disease-specific retrospective analyses.