Pediatric tumors of the central nervous system: a retrospective study of 1,043 cases from a tertiary care center in South India

The objective of this study is to describe the age, sex, location, and histopathology of pediatric tumors of the central nervous system diagnosed at a tertiary care center in South India. One thousand forty-three tumors that occurred in children between 0 and 18 years of age diagnosed between 1 January 1990 and 31 December 2004 were reclassified according to the WHO 2007 classification, and the clinical data were analyzed. The mean age at diagnosis was 10.9 years with a male/female ratio of 1.7:1 with a male preponderance in most tumors. The five most frequent tumors were: astrocytoma (47.3%), medulloblastoma (11.4%), craniopharyngioma (9.7%), ependymal tumors (4.8%), and nerve sheath tumors (4.1%). Of these, 53.3% of the tumors were supratentorial, 40.6% were infratentorial, and 6.1% occurred in the spinal cord. Although the number of patients treated annually steadily increased over the study period, there was no relative increase in pediatric neoplasms compared to adults. The majority of tumors showed a male preponderance with astrocytoma being the most common tumor type. Although the cerebellum was the most frequent single site of occurrence, tumors involved the supraratentorial compartment more often than the infratentorial compartment.