Therapeutic Regimens and Prognostic Factors of BrainMetastatic Cancers

Abstract

<br/><b>Objective</b>: This work aims to investigate the therapeutic regimen of brain metastatic cancers and therelationship between clinical features and prognosis. <br/><b>Methods</b>: Clinical data of 184 patients with brain metastaticcancers were collected and analysed for the relationship between survival time and age, gender, primary diseases,quantity of brain metastatic foci, their position, extra cranial lesions, and therapeutic regimens. <br/><b>Results</b>: Theaverage age of onset was 59.1 years old. The median survival time (MST) was 15.0 months, and the patients withbreast cancer as the primary disease had the longest survival time. Females had a longer survival time than males.Patients with meningeal metastasis had extremely short survival time. Those with less than 3 brain metastaticfoci survived longer than patients with more than 3. The MST of patients receiving radiotherapy only and thepatients receiving chemotherapy only were all 10.0 months while the MST of patients receiving combinationtherapy was 16.0 months. Multiple COX regression analysis demonstrated that gender, primary diseases, andquantity of brain metastatic foci were independent prognostic factors for brain metastatic cancers. <br/><b>Conclusions</b>:Chemotherapy is as important as radiotherapy in the treatment of brain metastatic cancer. Combination therapyis the best treatment mode. Male gender, brain metastatic cancers originating in the gastrointestinal tract, morethan 3 metastatic foci, and involvement of meninges indicate a worse prognosis.