Management of patients aged >60 years with malignant glioma: good clinical status and radiotherapy determine outcome

Many clinical trials have shown that the most important prognostic variable in patients with malignant glioma is advanced age. However, can some patients aged >60 years still have relatively good outcomes with conventional surgical and radiotherapeutic treatment? A previous audit of practice (1983-89) suggested that functional status was an important prognostic variable in the elderly. We have reviewed a further cohort (1989-96) to evaluate changes in practice and outcomes given advances in neuroimaging, neurosurgery and radiotherapy. The major findings in this series of 80 patients aged over 60 years with a histological diagnosis of supratentorial malignant glioma were: (i) There was a relationship between management undertaken and clinical status of the patients (p <0.01), i.e. patients in good grade generally had tumour debulking and radiotherapy, whilst those in poor grade generally had only biopsy. (ii) There was a significant increase in survival of patients in the second period who received surgical debulking and post-operative radiotherapy (from a median of 23 to 41 weeks (p <0.05). (iii) It is likely that case selection accounted for much of this improvement since there was a direct relationship between median survival time and good clinical grade using the WHO performance scale. (iv) A shorter radiotherapy course (30 Gy in six fractions) was as efficacious as a conventional course (60 Gy in 30 fractions), and those patients having radiotherapy survived significantly longer than those not having this treatment (p = 0.001). This study has again demonstrated the importance of preoperative clinical grade and radiotherapy treatment in determining outcomes in patients >60 years. To put these data in a societal context a recent prospective multicentre audit of patients with malignant glioma in Scotland, and another audit from our unit, showed that between 24 and 65% of patients aged >60 years, with a CT diagnosis of malignant glioma do not undergo either surgery or radiotherapy. Advanced age per se should not be a bar to interventional treatment in patients aged >60 years with suspected malignant glioma.