[Controversy on treatments for gliomas]

Gliomas are representative primary malignant brain tumors, and with such tumors it is difficult to define the advanced stage. If the advanced stage indicates no curability by surgery alone, most gliomas would belong to this criterion because of their poor prognosis without any completely effective treatment. In this sense, no one could show a standard therapy to treat these unfortunate patients, for example, patients with glioblastoma, they could permit only 1 year survived even they had any applicable treatments to the lesions, these days. Treatment for low-grade gliomas has been most controversial for a long time, and no standard treatments have been determined so far. In this paper, as the treatment of low-grade gliomas it was intended to report what must be done for this patient and the present results of opinion survey for the treatment of gliomas which was done to professors of 80 institutes, from schools of medicine at all universities and medical colleges in Japan. For high-grade gliomas, some effectiveness of radiation therapy was disclosed as well as chemotherapy from recent papers. Gene therapy was also discussed briefly, its present status and future.