Spinal Cord Astrocytoma Case Study

The management of patients with spinal cord astrocytoma remains controversial, and there are currently no universally accepted treatment guidelines. As described in previous studies, the most significant predictor of survival in patients with SCA is the pathological grade of this disorder [4, 5, 12]. In the present study, similarly, patients who had low-grade SCA had a significantly better prognosis than those with high-grade SCA. Additionally, the role of surgical resection remains unclear, with current studies reporting conflicting data regarding its impact on survival [4, 18-23]. Some investigator recommended aggressive resection of SCA [17, 20, 22, 23], whereas others indicated that biopsy alone yielded a better prognosis [4. 5, 9, 24]. McGirt …show more content…
In our cohort, the patients with low-grade SCA who underwent GTR or STR showed significantly longer median …show more content…
Furthermore, our study revealed that postoperative neurological status was the most significant factors of predictors for a better prognosis (HR, 0.12; 95% CI, 0.02–0.95; P = 0.0443). In our cohort, 51.5% of patients were worse compared with their preoperative baseline. This is consistent with previous studies that have reported a postoperative neurological decline in 21% to 64% of patients [18, 22, 23, 24, 26]. However, it might become possible to improve the survival rate of spinal cord astrocytoma by preventing neurological aggravation after treatment. Also, with previous studies, tumor dissemination was seen to be a signifi cant poor prognostic factor for surviva [11, 14, 22, 24]. However, in our study, it is not considered in this