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