Treatment of malignant gliomas and brain metastases in adults with a combination of adriamycin, VM 26, and CCNU. Results of a phase II trial

The conventional treatment currently applied in malignant brain tumors in adults consists of surgery, often followed by irradiation of the brain. The prognosis is not encouraging, as the survival median does not exceed 11 months [8, 17]. Studies by Frankel and German [5] showed that where surgery alone is used, the survival median is about 6 months after extensive exeresis and two, 5 months after partial exeresis. After simple biopsy, the spontaneous survival median is 10 months. Comparable results were reported in the retrospective work of Roth and Elwidge. Radiotherapy increases the survival median established after surgical treatment alone by about 4 months (Frankel and German [5]). Experimental results in animals [16], which were later confirmed in man [7, 10, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 4, 6], have shown the potential value of chemotherapy and led to the development of new therapeutic methods, despite the limited number of drugs available and the fact that their combined effect has not been studied [11].