Early Resection Better Than Biopsy in Adults with Low-Grade Glioma

In adults, low-grade gliomas are infiltrative brain tumors that tend to grow more slowly than their high-grade histologic counterparts. Initial treatment consists of biopsy or surgical resection followed by close surveillance, chemotherapy, or radiation, with no universally accepted standard of care. Regardless of the initial surgical or medical management, low-grade gliomas virtually always recur. Whether or not early surgical resection provides survival benefit and outweighs surgical risk in low-grade gliomas has been debated. Retrospective studies that have compared biopsy versus resection have produced mixed results with a trend in favor of resection, but the benefit of resection in these studies may have been overestimated due to selec…