Prognostic factors and clinical outcomes in adult primary gliosarcoma patients: a Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) analysis from 2004 to 2015

Abstract

Objective: Gliosarcoma (GSC), a rare malignant brain tumor, is considered as a variant of isocitrate dehydrogenase 1 wild type (IDH1-WT) glioblastoma (GBM). This study aimed to retrospectively analyze the clinical characteristics of GSC and compare whether there are some differences of treatment strategies and outcomes between GSC and GBM patients through Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database.

Patients and methods: The clinical data of adults diagnosed with primary GSC between 2004 and 2015 were queried from SEER database. The Kaplan–Meier curve and the Cox model were performed to analyze the relationships between clinical parameters and patients' prognosis. Similar analyses were conducted for all primary GBM patients of SEER.

Results: In total, 527 GSC and 20,541 GBM patients with complete and valid clinical information were finally enrolled for further analysis. Compared with GBM, GSC owned a proclivity to temporal lobe rather than frontal lobe (p < 0.001), a less conservative extension of resection (EOR) (p < 0.001), and a higher sensitivity to radiotherapy (p < 0.001). As shown by univariate analysis, surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy could prolong the overall survival (OS) time of GSC, but EOR did not confer an advantage to the outcomes of patients, no matter whether combined radio/chemotherapy was given. In multivariate analysis, age more than 60 and lack of radio/chemotherapy were identified as independent risk factors for OS of GSC patients.

Conclusions: Our study found that although EOR seemed to be important to GBM, the extent of surgery did not show a clear relationship with the improved prognosis of GSC. Additionally, radiotherapy and chemotherapy could prolong patients’ survival time significantly, which suggests a more positive role of them in treating GSC and needs further investigations.

Keywords:

• Gliosarcoma
• surgical resection
• radiotherapy
• chemotherapy

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that the article content was composed in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 81872072 and 81572501).