Health and persistent functional late effects in adult survivors of childhood CNS tumours: A population-based cohort study

Child-related characteristics predicting subsequent health-related quality of life in 8- to 14-year-old children with and without cerebellar tumors: a prospective longitudinal study

“…11,16 Comparison groups have usually not been representative of children in the general population because they were selected from siblings or friends. 17 Furthermore, heterogeneity of the study population has limited separation of the multiple factors that may influence HRQoL such as tumor location, type of surgical and adjuvant treatment, 11,18 age at diagnosis and assessment, time from diagnosis, and sex, 3,12 especially in single-center studies. Finally, many previous studies have described tumor-related factors that are not amenable to change.…”

“…1 About half of long-term survivors of childhood brain tumors have moderate or severe disability, 2,3 experience chronic medical conditions and significant neurocognitive impairment, 4,5 achieve significantly lower educational attainment than the general population, 6 and suffer long-term socioeconomic disadvantage 7 including disadvantage in the work place 8 and impaired health-related quality of life (HRQoL). 9,10 Early identification of factors predicting impaired HRQoL would enable rehabilitation of these patients to be started early and reduce their risk of subsequent impaired HRQoL.…”

Subspecialisation in neurosurgery—does size matter?

“…Other outcomes, such as quality of life, may well be more important in this debate than mortality-especially from the patient and family perspective. This is particularly pertinent to paediatric central nervous system (CNS) tumours, where overall more than 75% of children will become long term survivors and studies have shown that over half of such survivors [4,11,12] will be left with moderate or severe disabilities. Furthermore, unlike upper gastrointestinal (GI) surgery, CNS tumour surgery probably only carries a peri-operative mortality rate of approximately 1%-making early mortality a less useful endpoint.…”

Neuropsychological Outcome of Children Treated for Standard Risk Medulloblastoma in the PNET4 European Randomized Controlled Trial of Hyperfractionated Versus Standard Radiation Therapy and Maintenance Chemotherapy

“…Extensive research has consistently recognized longitudinal impairments associated with medulloblastoma (MB), the most frequent malignant brain tumour of the central nervous system (CNS) during childhood [1][2][3] .…”