Temporal Muscle Thickness is an Independent Prognostic Biomarker in Patients with Glioma: Analysis of 261 Cases

Abstract

Purpose

Temporal muscle thickness (TMT) has been proposed as a novel surrogate marker for skeletal muscle mass in head and neck malignancies. This study investigated the TMT prognostic relevance with gliomas and evaluated the influence of TMT values on survival in patients with gliomas of different grades and IDH subtypes.

Methods

The patients’ TMT was measured on contrast-enhanced T1-weighted magnetic resonance images before surgical treatment. Patients were divided into two cohorts based on their median TMT values. The Kaplan–Meier curve was used to compute the overall survival (OS) of different categories and all gliomas. Univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses were conducted to assess the association between OS and TMT, hematological markers, and other clinical factors in glioma patients. Moreover, the clinical diagnostic efficiency of single and combination biomarkers was evaluated using receiver operating characteristic curve analysis.

Results

We retrospectively analyzed 261 patients with newly diagnosed glioma between November 2016 and May 2020 at Hunan Cancer Hospital. Cox analysis indicated that higher TMT (HR 0.286, P< 0.001) and higher KPS score (HR 0.629, P= 0.012) were protective prognostic factors and IDH wildtype status (HR 2.946, P< 0.001), RDW > 12.6 (HR 1.513, P= 0.036), and NLR > 4 (HR 1.560, P= 0.042) were poor prognostic factors for gliomas. Subsequently, patients with thicker TMT were found to have significantly better overall survival (P<0.001) than patients with thinner TMT among WHO III and WHO IV grade and patients with or without IDH mutation. TMT was considered a better single biomarker than recently prevalent hematological biomarkers for predicting high-grade [0.856 (0.797–0.916)] and IDH- wild-type [0.864 (0.786–0.941)] gliomas.

Conclusion

This study suggests that TMT is a positive biomarker for clinical prognosis in gliomas and that patients with thicker TMT have greater overall survival for gliomas of different grades and IDH subtypes.

Keywords:

• gliomas
• temporal muscle thickness
• IDH status
• overall survival
• prognostic biomarkers

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Editage for English language editing.

Data Sharing Statement

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current retrospective study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

A Declaration of Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This research study was conducted retrospectively from data obtained from Hunan Cancer Hospital for clinical purposes and was approved by Medical Ethics Committee of Hunan Cancer Hospital. The name of the approving Ethics Committee/Institutional Review Board: The Affiliated Tumor Hospital of Xiangya Medical College of Central South University/Hunan Cancer Hospital Medical Ethics Committee. (The ethical approval number: SBQLL-2021-003).

Consent to Participate

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study during the follow-up.

Disclosure

All the authors declared that they have no conflicts of interest.