Abstract
Introduction: Brain tumors in children are the main cause of cancer
related death in the pediatric population. Brainstem tumors incidence
comprises 10.9% of all brain tumors having the Pediatric Diffuse
Intrinsic Pontine Gliomas (DIPG) a fatal prognosis. Some countries have
developed a national and international register database, to
characterize their population. This study provides a retrospective
population-based data to describe the epidemiology of children with DIPG
in México from 2001-2021, and assesses the proposed prognostic factors
previously described for survival outcome. Methods: Health Institutions
from México were invited to fill in a retrospective registry of DIPG
patients. Epidemiological, clinical, diagnostic, histopathologic and
treatment variables were described. Fisher exact test was used to
compare long, and short-term survivors and overall survival was
estimated using the Kaplan-Meier Method. Differences between survival
curves were evaluated using the Log-rank test and Cox proportional
hazards regression analysis. Results: One-hundred and ten patients were
included in the analysis. Median age at diagnosis was 7 years. Sixty
patients (54.5%) presented with symptoms in less than 6 months being
the most frequent ataxia (56.4%). Treatment was offered to 90 patients
(81.8%), overall survival at 160 weeks (4 years) was 11.4%, and 16
patients (14.5%) arrived at clinical centers to die. We found no
significant survival differences in any of the prognostic factors.
Conclusion: This study highlights the need to develop improvement
strategies to streamline healthcare processes and enhance quality of
care to strengthen our situational diagnosis in Mexico.