A retrospective study of primary brain tumors in children under 14 years of age at PIMS, Islamabad.

The aim of present study was to determine the relative frequency of primary brain tumors among children under 14 years of age in Pakistan. A retrospective review of pediatric primary brain tumors, encountered over 13 years (January 1998 through July 2010) at the Neurosurgical Unit of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), Islamabad, Pakistan, was made covering 231 cases, 142 (61.5%) males and 89 (38.5%) females, with a male to female ratio of 1.69:1. The cases were divided into 5 age groups each covering three years of life (0-2, 3-5, 6-8,9-11 and 12-14 years), with the greatest number in age group 3 i.e. 6-8 years (32%) and the least number of patients in age groups 1 and 5 (10.3% each). The 231 malignancies were categorized by site into two groups, supratentorial (83 cases; 35.9%) and infratentorial (148 cases; 64.1%). The morphological distribution was medulloblastoma (33.3%), astrocytoma (24.7%), mixed gliomas (14.7%), craniopharyngioma (11.7%), ependymoma (8.7%), PNET (6.1%) and pineal tumor (0.9%). Since only a single institution was studied, cautious interpretation is needed. Ideally, a population-based approach would be adopted to determine the cancer burden due to pediatric malignancies of the brain in this population and for their morphological categorization in Pakistan.