Julieta Castro

and 7 more

Introduction: Brain tumors in children are the main cause of cancer related death in the pediatric population. Brainstem tumors incidence comprises 10.9% of all brain tumors having the Pediatric Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Gliomas (DIPG) a fatal prognosis. Some countries have developed a national and international register database, to characterize their population. This study provides a retrospective population-based data to describe the epidemiology of children with DIPG in México from 2001-2021, and assesses the proposed prognostic factors previously described for survival outcome. Methods: Health Institutions from México were invited to fill in a retrospective registry of DIPG patients. Epidemiological, clinical, diagnostic, histopathologic and treatment variables were described. Fisher exact test was used to compare long, and short-term survivors and overall survival was estimated using the Kaplan-Meier Method. Differences between survival curves were evaluated using the Log-rank test and Cox proportional hazards regression analysis. Results: One-hundred and ten patients were included in the analysis. Median age at diagnosis was 7 years. Sixty patients (54.5%) presented with symptoms in less than 6 months being the most frequent ataxia (56.4%). Treatment was offered to 90 patients (81.8%), overall survival at 160 weeks (4 years) was 11.4%, and 16 patients (14.5%) arrived at clinical centers to die. We found no significant survival differences in any of the prognostic factors. Conclusion: This study highlights the need to develop improvement strategies to streamline healthcare processes and enhance quality of care to strengthen our situational diagnosis in Mexico.