Patient characteristics
The demographics, and clinicopathological characteristics of the patients are summarized in Table 1. A total of 1707 patients were screened, of which 901 were excluded (figure 1). Finally, 806 pediatric cases with histologically confirmed diagnosis of brainstem glioma were selected and analyzed. The median patient age at diagnosis was 6 years (range, 0-12). Patients were predominantly White (n= 596, 74%), followed by Black/African American (n=138, 17.1%) and other ethnic groups (n= 72, 8.9%). Males (n= 389, 48.3%) and females (n= 417, 51.7%) were approximately equally distributed.
Of the 806 cases, tumor size of 87(10.8%) was considered small (<=3cm) and that of 265 (32.9%) were large (>3cm), and size was unknown for 454 (56.3%). The histological grade of most tumors was unknown (n = 739; 91.7%). Most tumors (n = 720; 89.3%) were historic localized stage. Regarding treatment radiation therapy was the most common treatment employed for glioma (n=567, 70.3%), followed by chemotherapy (n=360, 44.7%); only 25 (3.1%) underwent some form of surgical resection. The median follow-up duration was 11 months. Of the total, 566 (70%) was randomly selected and designated as the training cohort and the remaining 240 (30%) formed the internal validation cohort (Table 1).
Table 1: Patients demographics and clinicopathological characteristics of the study population