[Single cerebral metastasis of bronchopulmonary cancers]

The most frequent brain metastasis originates from a lung cancer. About half of them are unique. We report a series of 36 patients with lung cancer, operated for a single brain lesion. The mean age was 57.6 years, most (83.3%) were male. Most of the metastases originated from a primary adenocarcinoma (52.8%), in 10 patients (27.8%) from an epidermoid carcinoma, in 4 patients (11.1%) from a small cell carcinoma and in 3 patients from a mixed lesion. The metastatic lesion was detected before the primary lesion in 20 cases (55.5%). The mean post-operative survival was 9.6 months. 36% were alive one year after surgical treatment. We evaluated our clinical findings, histopathological studies and the type of surgical and medical post-operative management, at the cerebral and pulmonary level, in order to make a possible prognosis. In our series we found that only post-operative clinical status (Karnofsky score) and the post-operative neurological grading (Order classification) were significant factors (p < 0.001) to determine survival time.