Citation

Chen YH, Keller J, Kang JH, Lin HC. J. Neurotrauma 2012; 29(7): 1328-1333.

Affiliation

Taipei, Taiwan; yichen@tmu.edu.tw.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2012, Mary Ann Liebert Publishers)

DOI

10.1089/neu.2011.2235

PMID

22320191

Abstract

This population-based study aimed to investigate the risk of having a diagnosis of malignant brain tumors within three years following a traumatic brain injury (TBI) in Taiwan. This study used data from the Traumatic Brain Injury Registry and the National Health Insurance Research Database. The study cohort comprised 5,007 patients who had visited ambulatory care centers or had been hospitalized with a diagnosis of TBI between 2001 and 2002. The comparison cohort was 25,035 randomly selected enrollees. Each patient's brain cancer status was individually tracked for a three-year period following their index date. Stratified Cox proportional hazards regressions were performed for analyses. During the three years of follow-up, nine patients in each group, both the TBI and the non-TBI group, were diagnosed with brain cancer. As compared to those patients without TBI, patients with TBI were more likely to receive a diagnosis of malignant brain tumors within the three-year period following their index date: the incidence rate of malignant brain tumors was 6.28 (95%CI: 3.06-11.53) per 10,000 person-years in patients with TBI and 1.25 (95%CI: 0.61-2.29) per 10,000 person-years in patients without TBI. After adjusting for sociodemographic characteristics, the hazard of being diagnosed with malignant brain tumors during the three-year follow-up period was 4.67 (95% CI = 1.84-11.83) times greater for those who suffered a TBI than for patients in the comparison cohort. In addition, we found an association between TBI severity and malignant brain tumor among patients with TBI (p=0.033). Our findings suggest a positive correlation between TBI and the relatively short-term development of malignant neoplasms of the brain.

Language: en