Epidemiology of meningiomas. A nationwide study of surgically treated tumours on French medico-administrative data

Background: To describe the epidemiology of surgically treated meningiomas and compare the results with previously published studies. Methods: We processed the French medico-administrative national hospital discharge summary database, Programme de Medicalisation des Systemes d'Information (PMSI) using an algorithm combining the type of surgical procedure and codes from the International Classification of Diseases to retrieve appropriate cases of meningiomas operated between 2008 and 2016. Results: This nationwide study found 25,737 cases of operated meningiomas. Global incidence of operated meningiomas equals 4.51, 95%CI [4.46-4.57] for 100 000 person-years and increased over the last 9 years. Benign neoplasms account for 91.3%, neoplasms of uncertain or unknown behaviour for 6.2% and malignant for 2.5%. There is a decrement of female over male ratios as the malignancy potential progresses. Incidence of operated meningiomas was 3 times more frequent in women than men. Mean age at surgery was 57.6 years for women and 59.5 for men. The incidence of meningioma surgery increases with age and is maximal for the 60-64 years category. Only 0.4% of operated patients were under 18 years. Meningioma surgeries of the cranial convexity and the middle skull base are the most common. Conclusion: The PMSI database is a reliable and effective source for studying the epidemiology of surgically treated meningiomas, including the precise location of the tumour. Our findings comfort previous studies and are comparatively correlated. This may assert the usefulness of such a database to investigate the patients' outcome after meningioma surgery.