A comprehensive analysis of primary malignant brain tumors radiotherapy in a low-resourced country: A single-institution retrospective study.

Abstract

e14035 Background: The purpose of this study is to investigate radiation treatment of primary malignant brain tumors in a country with limited resources and infrastructure, and make a general statistical analysis of patients and the prevalence of different types of tumors. Methods: This single-institution retrospective study examines patients with primary brain tumors treated at the Radiotherapy Department of the National Center of Oncology, the leading radiotherapy center in Armenia, where the vast majority of patients with such tumors receive their treatment. The study includes information on all patients presented in a 3-year period, from 2021 to 2023. The main variables examined were age, gender, residence, diagnosis and the type of machines used for radiotherapy with the daily dosage and number of fractions. Results: A total of 157 cases were included in the final analysis.The mean age of patients was 51 years. Male to female ratio was 1.2:1. 89 patients (56.7%) had urban residency. The most common types of brain tumors were different types of gliomas (73.9%), meningiomas (6.4%) and ependymomas (5.7%). 64.3% of patients had undergone total tumor resection before radiotherapy, 21.7% received radiotherapy after subtotal resection and 14.0% of patients hadn’t undergone any surgery. The mean daily dosage and mean fractions sessions were 1.9739 and 28.2166, respectively. The main radiotherapy machine used for treatment was 3D-CRT 6 MEV ELEKTA linear accelerator (94.9%), however, in some cases, 2D Co-60 Teragam radiotherapy machine (5.1%) was used. Only 50.3 % of patients are alive at the time of analysis. Conclusions: The results of this study show that the radiotherapy treatment of primary malignant brain tumors is still challenging in developing countries like Armenia. This research may help to comprehensively understand the main problems in organizing the treatment of primary malignant brain tumors.