A temporal study of survival of patients with pontine gliomas.

Twenty-four cases of pontine glioma were treated over a 16 year period. Survival times are discussed, particularly long survival times, on the basis of 13 cases autopsied. Onset occurred in an age range of 5 to 60 years, and 5 of the 13 autopsied cases involved children. The average survival time was 9 months except for 2 long survival cases, one of 4 years and 7 months and the other of 14 years and 10 months. The longer the survival time, the greater was the number of neurological symptoms detected, but there was no relationship between the involvement of cranial nerves and the survival time. The improvement of cranial nerve disorders was more prominent in the long survival cases than that of other neurological disturbances. The time from onset of symptoms to admission was longer for long survival cases than the others, and the autopsies of two long survival cases revealed astrocytoma. There were no cases which survived more than one year in the glioblastoma multiforme group.