Authors: Kevin Petrecca MarieChristine Guiot Valerie PanetRaymond Luis Souhami
Publish Date: 2012/10/10
Volume: 111, Issue: 1, Pages: 19-23
Abstract
Glioblastomas GBM are highly motile cancers that invade through normal brain In the absence of curative chemotherapy this invasion beyond surgical and radiotherapy margins to distant brain sites is thought to be an important cause of treatment failure Paradoxically studies analyzing failure patterns have consistently shown that the large majority of failures occur at the original tumor site This conflict may be explained by the fact these cancers are often only subtotally resected and radiotherapy and chemotherapies fail to control this significant local cancer burden We analyzed the failure pattern in 20 consecutive patients with complete resection of the gadoliniumenhancing portion of GBM demonstrated on the immediate postoperative magnetic resonance study and who underwent a radical course of radiotherapy and chemotherapy We found that recurrences occurred only at the resection margin in 17 of 20 patients Recurrences were exclusively distant in 2 of 20 patients and occurred at both the resection margin and a distant site in 1 of 20 cases We found that even in cases of complete resection of the gadoliniumenhancing portion of GBM 85 of recurrences are localized to the resection margin
Keywords: