Diagnosis and Treatment of Leptomeningeal Metastasis in Non-small Cell Lung Cancer

Abstract

Leptomeningeal metastasis (LM) is one of the disastrous events in managing advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) due to severe clinical symptoms and a grave prognosis. Although intrathecal (IT) chemotherapy show some effects for LM in advanced NSCLC, the prognosis is still poor (12 wk-14 wk). A large majority (84%-97%) of the patients were found to have adenocarcinoma histology. Epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) senstive mutations were detected in 43.0%-70.5% adenocarcinoma patients with LM. EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) showed to be effective for LM in selected NSCLC patients in some reseaches, and confer a survival benefit. Furthermore, future trials need be done to determine the effect of EGFR-TKIs treatment in NSCLC-LM patients.

Keywords

• Lung neoplasms
• Leptomeningeal metastasis
• EGFR-TKI
• Targeted therapy
• Intrathecal chemotherapy