Medulloblastomas in children and adolescents from 1989 to 2015

Medulloblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumor in children and adolescents and its therapy is still difficult due to the vulnerability of the child's brain. Medulloblastomas arise in the posterior fossa of the cerebellum and can metastasize via the cerebrospinal fluid pathways. Despite aggressive treatments consisting of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy, medulloblastomas remain incurable in many patients. In the last few decades, better and better survival rates have been achieved through ever more specific therapeutic approaches, but many of the patients continue to die or suffer from tumor- or therapy-related long-term sequelae. It is crucial for a favorable prognosis to identify high-risk patients as early as possible, to provide them with an appropriate therapy and, if necessary, to initiate an early intensification of therapy. The present work represents a monocentric, retrospective study of the clinical course of all pediatric patients in whom a medulloblastoma was initially diagnosed between 1989 and 2015 at the Universitätsmedizin Göttingen by neurosurgical surgery with subsequent histopathological work-up. For this purely institutional patient collective, the prognostic significance of different influencing factors such as age, tumor extent, surgical management, extent of tumor resection and the histopathological subclassification on the long-term therapy result with regard to the endpoints progression-free and overall survival should be examined.2022-03-1