SINGLE CEREBRAL METASTASES OF BRONCHOPULM ONARY CANCERS

The most frequent brain metastasis originates from a lung cancer. Abou t half of them are unique. We report a series of 36 patients with lung cancer, operated for a single brain lesion. The mean age was 57.6 yea rs, most (83.3 %) were male. Most of the metastases originated from a primary adenocarcinoma (52.8 %), in 10 patients (27.8 %) from an epide rmoid carcinoma, in 4 patients (11.1 %) from a small cell carcinoma an d in 3 patients from a mixed lesion. The metastatic lesion was detecte d before the primary lesion in 20 cases (55.5 %). The mean post-operat ive survival was 9.6 months. 36 % were alive one year after surgical t reatment. We evaluated our clinically findings, histopathological stud ies and the type of surgical and medical post-operative management, at the cerebral and pulmonary level in order to make a possible prognosi s. In our series we found that only post-operative clinical status (Ka rnofsky score) and the post-operative neurological grading (Order clas sification) were significant factors (p < 0.001) to determine survival time.