Symptom interval and treatment burden for patients with malignant central nervous system germ cell tumours
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Patients with central nervous system germ cell tumours (CNS-GCTs) commonly initially present to primary care or general paediatricians. Prolonged symptom intervals (SI) are frequently seen in CNS-GCTs and have been associated with inferior outcomes in other brain tumours. This study reviewed the clinical presentation of CNS-GCTs and examined the effect of prolonged SI. DESIGN/SETTING/PATIENTS/OUTCOMES: International multicentre 10-year retrospective study (2002-2011 inclusive), across six international paediatric oncology treatment centres. All newly diagnosed patients with CNS-GCT were included. Main outcome measure was time interval from first symptom to diagnosis. RESULTS: The study cohort included 86 (58 males:28 female) patients (59 'germinoma' and 27 'non-germinomatous' GCTs), with tumours being pineal (n=33), suprasellar (n=25), bifocal (pineal+suprasellar; n=24) and 'other' site (n=4), of which 16 (19%) were metastatic. Median age at diagnosis was 14 years (0-23 years). The time to diagnosis from first symptom (SI) was 0-69 months (median 3 months, mean 9 months). A prolonged SI (>6 months) was observed in 28/86 patients (33%) and significantly associated with metastatic disease (11/28 (39%) vs 5/58 (9%); p=0.002)) at diagnosis, but not overall survival. With prolonged SI, endocrine symptoms, particularly diabetes insipidus, were more common (21/28 (75%) vs 14/58 (24%) patients; p<0.002), but raised intracranial pressure (RICP) was less frequent (4/28 (14%) vs 43/58 (74%) patients; p<0.001)) at first symptom. CONCLUSIONS: One-third of patients with CNS-GCT have >6 months of symptoms prior to diagnosis. Delayed diagnosis is associated with metastatic disease. Early symptom recognition, particularly related to visual and hormonal disturbances in the absence of RICP, may improve timely diagnosis, reduce metastatic disease frequency and consequently reduce treatment burden and late effects.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".