[Concomitant chemoradiotherapy and malignant glial tumors in the adult]

The prognosis of adult patients with malignant gliomas remains poor despite advances in neurosurgery and radiotherapy. Even if chemotherapy has done little to improve on these results, except in the treatment of oligodendrogliomas, many authors have proposed to test the effect of radiotherapy by adding concomitant chemotherapy. Unfortunately, the analysis of these studies is difficult because all these protocols are different with a small number of patients. Furthermore, there are only a few studies evaluated in well controlled clinical trials with homogeneous patient population. Important factors such as tumor grade, patient age, and Karnofsky score, which have a strong influence on survival in malignant gliomas, are not clearly evaluated. Whatever, all these studies suggest that concomitant radio-chemotherapy seems not be promising in the treatment of malignant gliomas.