Epidemiology of Primary Brain and Spinal Cord Tumors in Iran: a systematic review

Cancers are among the most common causes of deaths worldwide and just the third cause of deaths as well as they are more common in elderly, with an aging population in Iran. Iran is going to face an increase in the incidence of malignancies in the next decades.
This study has tried to use the existing evidences through a systematic review beside the national cancer registry (NCR) database between 2000 and 2009 to find out the incidence of primary malignant and benign CNS tumors in Iran. International databases of Medline, Embase, ISI web of knowledge and Google scholar along with three major Persian indexing websites of SID, MagIran and IranMedex are searched. Primary searches resulted in finding of 966 papers of which 11 were selected for analysis.
Primary malignant CNS tumors form 2.3% of all tumors in the ten-year registry data. Incidence of primary malignant brain tumors in Iran is 3.3 per 100,000 person-year, 3.9 for males and 2.8 for females. A total number of 10,797 cases are registered in the NCR data, which demonstrate astrocytoma (32.4%), glioblastoma (29%), oligodendroglioma (6.2%), medulloblastoma (6.1%), and ependymoma (2.7%) as the most common pathologies in primary brain tumors. Primary malignant spinal cord tumors consists 6.8% of all CNS tumors. Common pathologies in spinal cord tumors are malignant neoplasm, ependymoma, astrocytoma and lymphoma. However, the two benign spinal cord tumors of neurofibroma and schwannoma are believed to be more frequent than malignant ones.
Most common benign pathologies are meningioma (27.8%), pituitary adenoma (11.3%), schwannoma (5.8%), and congenital tumors (2.4%). Primary benign tumors in Iran have an incidence of 3.5 per 100,000 person-year.