Epidemiology and Statistical Analysis of Gliomas

Abstract

There have been a great many studies on the epidemiology and statistical analysis of brain tumors [1,4–6, 9, 18,22], but most of them have been concerned with tumors of the entire central nervous system. There have been few detailed studies on gliomas alone. One reason for the scarcity of such work is the fact that, starting with the classification of Bailey and Cushing [3], several classification schemes have been devised [11, 17, 25–27] based upon various criteria—often by the degree of malignancy, as seen in the Kernohan and Say re classification [11]. No unified schema has yet been developed. Schoenberg has emphasized that when undertaking an epidemiological investigation the most important factor is the classification of distinct disease entities [18]. For both epidemiological study and analysis of operative results, if uniformity of the histological classification has not been achieved, it is impossible to make use of the survey results. International uniformity of the histological classification is all the more essential because the incidence of glioma is low and the number of cases treated at any given institute is small.