The occurrence of pregnancy in women with brain tumors confronts both patients and physicians with difficult decision making at each stage of pregnancy. We studied the course of events of nine pregnancies in seven women with low-grade glioma in our hospital over a 10 year period. Five patients had a surgical resection, one a biopsy and one woman was followed by wait-and-see policy before pregnancy. In two women, a therapeutic abortion was carried out in the first trimester because of signs of progression, necessitating surgical removal of the tumor. In the other five women pregnancy had an uncomplicated course. Based on a literature review, we found 28 women diagnosed with a known glioma before becoming pregnant. All pregnancies but one, were uneventful and all women had a normal delivery, including the seven cases with exposure to chemotherapy and in whom healthy babies were born. A total of 75 pregnant women were identified in whom new onset glioma developed, which was high-grade in 56 %, and becoming symptomatic in 51 % during the third trimester, usually by focal neurological deficits. We conclude that in relation to pregnancy, low-grade gliomas are more often seen in women already known with a brain tumor, while high-grade gliomas represent more frequently a new onset phenomenon. Based on these observations, guidelines are given on initiation of antitumor therapy during pregnancy, seizure management, counseling on therapeutic abortion, and on the timing and choice of obstetrical interventions.

Early resection is standard of care for presumed low-grade gliomas. This is based on studies including only tumors that were post-surgically confirmed as low-grade glioma. Unfortunately this does not represent the clinicians’ situation wherein he/she has to deal with a lesion on MRI that is suspect for low-grade glioma (i.e. without prior knowledge on the histological diagnosis). We therefore aimed to determine the optimal initial strategy for patients with a lesion suspect for low-grade glioma, but not histologically proven yet. We retrospectively identified 150 patients with a resectable presumed low-grade-glioma and who were otherwise in good clinical condition. In this cohort we compared overall survival between three types of initital treatment strategy: a wait-and-scan approach (n = 38), early resection (n = 83), or biopsy for histopathological verification (n = 29). In multivariate analysis, no difference was observed in overall survival for early resection compared to wait-and-scan: hazard ratio of 0.92 (95% CI 0.43–2.01; p = 0.85). However, biopsy strategy showed a shorter overall survival compared to wait-and-scan: hazard ratio of 2.69 (95% CI 1.19–6.06; p = 0.02). In this cohort we failed to confirm superiority of early resection over a wait-and-scan approach in terms of overall survival, though longer follow-up is required for final conclusion. Biopsy was associated with shorter overall survival.

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