Implications of prognostic markers in brain tumors

prognoses for patients with solid brain tumors are based on a variety of pa tient characteristics and on the histological type and grade of the tumor; however, there are well-recognized subpopulations of patients with particul ar types and grades of tumors for which this patient and histologic informa tion unreliably predicts prognosis, in an effort to improve brain tumor pro gnostic accuracy, especially in these difficult cases, recent intensive inv estigation has been devoted to identifying molecular markers of prognosis i n brain tumors. The usefulness of five widely-studied potential prognostic markers (MIB-1, telomerase, p53/EGFR, BCL-2) is discussed, based on current evidence in the literature.