High Altitude Carotid Body Tumors Growth During active Surveillance

The gold standard for patients with carotid body tumors (CBT) is surgical resection; nevertheless, some patients are unfit for surgery or, for other reasons, could not be operated on. Active surveillance has been known to be a reasonable strategy for these cases. This study aimed to evaluate tumor growth in unoperated patients with CBTs.

A retrospective review of all unoperated patients with CBT from a single academic hospital diagnosed between 2014 and 2021 was performed. Results of nonparametric testing were presented using the median and ranges for Mann-Whitney-U or Kruskal-Wallis. Significance was defined as a 2-tailed P < .05.

The cohort included a total of 31 patients, with a median age of 60 years (range: 37-80 years), of which 27 (87.1%) were females. The patients live at a median altitude of 2800 meters (range: 2756-2980 meters) above sea level. Twenty (64.5%) patients had Shamblin I tumors, eight (25.8%) patients had Shamblin II tumors, and three (9.7%) patients had Shamblin III tumors. Median CBT volume at diagnosis was 14.1 cm3 (range: .9 - 213.3 cm³). Median volume at diagnosis of symptomatic tumors was substantially larger than asymptomatic tumors, 49.2 cm³ vs 7.9 cm³, respectively (P = .03). Median growth of the tumors during a median 15-month follow-up (range: 3-43 months) was 3.3 cm³ (range: 0-199.9 cm³). Overall, 77% (n = 24) of the CBTs grew at least 1 cm³.

Most patients in the present study had tumor growth by at least 1 cm³, with a median tumor growth of 3.3 cm.³ In the present study tumor growth was shown to be greater than other low altitude CBT active surveillance studies; therefore, surgical resection should be recommended in patients with CBT living at high altitudes.