Objective responses to chemotherapy in recurrent glioma: A prospective analysis from the German Glioma Network.

2037 Background: Outside of controlled trials, the occurrence of objective responses (OR) to chemotherapy in glioma patients is poorly characterized. Further, the predictive value of OR for progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) in glioma patients is unclear. Methods: In this study we screened the German Glioma Network Database for patients that had received any chemotherapy for recurrent glioma from 2004-2008. Patients with a gross total resection of the recurrent tumor, patients receiving radiotherapy for the recurrent tumor and patients with spinal gliomas were excluded. 655 chemotherapies in 487 patients were identified. The prospectively documented responses to these chemotherapies were reevaluated in the 8 participating centers and 69 ORs (corresponding to OR in 10.5% of all chemotherapies) were identified (partial responses, PR or complete responses, CR, according to the original Macdonald criteria). For 52 of these (75.4% of all cases with OR) imaging data were evaluable for cen...