Medulloblastoma is not only a children's cancer: 25 adult cases from Adana
Ten years of operations suggest that removing the whole tumour matters for adults too.
Medulloblastoma, a fast-growing tumour at the back of the brain, is usually thought of as a childhood cancer. Adults get it too, though rarely.
Neurosurgeons at Adana City Training and Research Hospital describe 25 adults, aged 17 to 63, whom they operated on between 2006 and 2016. Their report appeared in The Ulutas Medical Journal in 2020. All patients went on to receive radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
Surgeons removed the entire visible tumour in 20 patients and only part of it in five. That difference proved telling: all five patients with incomplete removal died 18 to 24 months after surgery. Across the whole group, survival over three to five years of follow-up was 60%.
Eleven tumours were of the desmoplastic type, a variant seen more often in adults. Complications included fluid build-up in the brain needing a shunt in three patients and spinal fluid leaks in four.
Caveat: this is a small retrospective case series without a comparison group, so it cannot separate the effect of surgery from other factors.
Source: Ali Arslan et al. Adult Medulloblastoma: Clinical Profile and Treatment Result of 25 Patients. Ulutas Med J 2020. doi:10.5455/umj.20200712045718.
Image: Figure 2 of the article, CC BY-NC 4.0.
