Temporal Muscle Thickness is an Independent Prognostic Biomarker in Patients with Glioma: Analysis of 261 Cases

PURPOSE: Temporal muscle thickness (TMT) has been proposed as a novel surrogate marker for skeletal muscle mass in head and neck malignancies. This study investigated the TMT prognostic relevance with gliomas and evaluated the influence of TMT values on survival in patients with gliomas of different grades and IDH subtypes. METHODS: The patients’ TMT was measured on contrast-enhanced T1-weighted magnetic resonance images before surgical treatment. Patients were divided into two cohorts based on their median TMT values. The Kaplan–Meier curve was used to compute the overall survival (OS) of different categories and all gliomas. Univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses were conducted to assess the association between OS and TMT, hematological markers, and other clinical factors in glioma patients. Moreover, the clinical diagnostic efficiency of single and combination biomarkers was evaluated using receiver operating characteristic curve analysis. RESULTS: We retrospectively analyzed 261 patients with newly diagnosed glioma between November 2016 and May 2020 at Hunan Cancer Hospital. Cox analysis indicated that higher TMT (HR 0.286, P< 0.001) and higher KPS score (HR 0.629, P= 0.012) were protective prognostic factors and IDH wildtype status (HR 2.946, P< 0.001), RDW > 12.6 (HR 1.513, P= 0.036), and NLR > 4 (HR 1.560, P= 0.042) were poor prognostic factors for gliomas. Subsequently, patients with thicker TMT were found to have significantly better overall survival (P<0.001) than patients with thinner TMT among WHO III and WHO IV grade and patients with or without IDH mutation. TMT was considered a better single biomarker than recently prevalent hematological biomarkers for predicting high-grade [0.856 (0.797–0.916)] and IDH- wild-type [0.864 (0.786–0.941)] gliomas. CONCLUSION: This study suggests that TMT is a positive biomarker for clinical prognosis in gliomas and that patients with thicker TMT have greater overall survival for gliomas of different grades and IDH subtypes.