Testicular tumors in children and adolescents.

OBJECTIVE

To perform a comparative assessment of the clinical and epidemiological aspects of testicular tumors in childhood and adolescence.

METHODS

Retrospective analysis of medical records of patients with testicular or paratesticular neoplasms. Patients under 10 years were classified as children and patients between 10 and 20 were classified as adolescents. The obtained results were compared through the two-sample test for proportions: non-parametric Mann-Whitney test and log-rank test.

RESULTS

60 patients were admitted in the period from January 1992 to July 2009: 34 children and 26 adolescents with testicular or paratesticular neoplasms. The main manifestations were testicular tumor and scrotal pain. Pain complaints were more common in adolescents (p = 0.006), who presented a mean time from disease onset to diagnosis of 4.9 months, longer than children, who presented a period of 2.3 months from disease onset to diagnosis (p = 0.01). Histological types were as follows: germ cell tumors in 32/60 (53%), rhabdomyosarcomas (RMSs) in 23/60 (38.3%), and other in 5/60 (8.3%). Adolescents presented a higher incidence of RMSs, lymph node metastases (p = 0.003) and distant metastases (p = 0.035). Differences in survival rates among the studied patients were not statistically significant, the only indicative being that survival in RMS cases is longer for children (p = 0.072).

CONCLUSIONS

Compared to children, adolescents with testicular tumor presented longer time from disease onset to diagnosis, aggressive histological type and advanced illness at diagnosis, despite the small sample analyzed.