Indian Council of Medical Research consensus document for the management of gastrointestinal stromal tumors

Clinico-Pathological Characteristics and Mutational Analysis of Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumors from India: A Single Institution Experience

Background:

Gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) is the most common type of mesenchymal neoplasm of gastrointestinal tract. The incidence of GIST in India is not known and its treatment strategy in our country is largely derived from studies in other global populations. Some of the most important features of this type of cancer include its size, site of origin, mitotic index, histology and Immunohistochemistry. In this report we have studied these parameters in the Indian GIST patients presenting at our center. Additionally, we have also studied the mutational spectrum of these GISTs by next generation sequencing.

Methods:

Thirty one Indian patients of GIST were enrolled in this study and information regarding age, gender, tumor location and size was collected from their records. Immunohistochemistry studies were performed by the pathologist. Mutational analysis of these samples was performed by next generation sequencing.

Results and Discussion:

The most common site of GIST occurrence in our study was stomach. The tumor size for all 31 patients ranged between 0.6 cms to 20 cms. A spindle-cell pattern was present in 24 out of 31 of the cases. 29 out of 31 subjects were positive for CD117 expression. C-KIT was the most highly mutated gene indentified in our patients. Apart from these findings we observed many similarities as well as dissimilarities between the results of our study and literature published previously.

Conclusions:

The dissimilarities in the results of our study and published literature could be attributed to the genetic or ethnic differences that exist between the Indian population and other global populations. The results of our study warrant a need to conduct studies of GIST in a much larger population of India. Such large scale studies may also help in better treatment and/or prevention of GIST in developing countries like India.

Evidence mapping based on systematic reviews of therapeutic interventions for gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST)

Background

Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumours (GISTs) are the most common mesenchymal tumours. Currently, different pharmacological and surgical options are used to treat localised and metastatic GISTs, although this research field is broad and the body of evidence is scattered and expanding. Our objectives are to identify, describe and organise the current available evidence for GIST through an evidence mapping approach.

Methods

We followed the methodology of Global Evidence Mapping (GEM). We searched Pubmed, EMBASE, The Cochrane Library and Epistemonikos in order to identify systematic reviews (SRs) with or without meta-analyses published between 1990 and March 2016. Two authors assessed eligibility and extracted data. Methodological quality of the included systematic reviews was assessed using AMSTAR. We organised the results according to identified PICO questions and presented the evidence map in tables and a bubble plot.

Results

A total of 17 SRs met eligibility criteria. These reviews included 66 individual studies, of which three quarters were either observational or uncontrolled clinical trials. Overall, the quality of the included SRs was moderate or high. In total, we extracted 14 PICO questions from them and the corresponding results mostly favoured the intervention arm.

Conclusions

The most common type of study used to evaluate therapeutic interventions in GIST sarcomas has been non-experimental studies. However, the majority of the interventions are reported as beneficial or probably beneficial by the respective authors of SRs. The evidence mapping is a useful and reliable methodology to identify and present the existing evidence about therapeutic interventions.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12874-017-0402-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.