Surgery or radiosurgery plus whole brain radiotherapy versus surgery or radiosurgery alone for brain metastases.

BackgroundThe benefits of adding upfront whole-brain radiotherapy (WBRT) to surgery or stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) when compared to surgery or SRS alone for treatment of brain metastases are unclear.ObjectivesTo compare the efficacy and safety of surgery or SRS plus WBRT with that of surgery or SRS alone for treatment of brain metastases in patients with systemic cancer.Search methodsWe searched MEDLINE, EMBASE and The Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) up to May 2013 and annual meeting proceedings of ASCO and ASTRO up to September 2012 for relevant studies.Selection criteriaRandomised controlled trials (RCTs) comparing surgery or SRS plus WBRT with surgery or SRS alone for treatment of brain metastases.Data collection and analysisTwo review authors undertook the quality assessment and data extraction. The primary outcome was overall survival (OS). Secondary outcomes include progression free survival (PFS), local and distant intracranial disease progression, neurocognitive function (NF), health related quality of life (HRQL) and neurological adverse events. Hazard ratios (HR), risk ratio (RR), confidence intervals (CI), P-values (P) were estimated with random effects models using Revman 5.1 MAIN

RESULTS

We identified five RCTs including 663 patients with one to four brain metastases. The risk of bias associated with lack of blinding was high and impacted to a greater or lesser extent on the quality of evidence for all of the outcomes. Adding upfront WBRT decreased the relative risk of any intracranial disease progression at one year by 53% (RR 0.47, 95% CI 0.34 to 0.66, P value Authors' conclusionsThere is low quality evidence that adding upfront WBRT to surgery or SRS decreases any intracranial disease progression at one year. There was no clear evidence of an effect on overall and progression free survival. The impact of upfront WBRT on neurocognitive function, health related quality of life and neurological adverse events was undetermined due to the high risk of performance and detection bias, and inconsistency in the instruments and methods used to measure and report results across studies.