Abstract
Purpose :
To determine whether the frequency of a positive family history of retinoblastoma in children presenting with newly diagnosed retinoblastoma has remained stable or increased in recent years.
Methods :
The authors reviewed the Ocular Oncology records of 206 children with newly diagnosed retinoblastoma encountered during the period July 1980 through June 2015. We abstracted information regarding multiple patient, tumor and treatment variables (including laterality of ocular involvement and family history of retinoblastoma) from each of these records. We subdivided our group into 4 subgroups of 51 or 52 cases each by chronological date of initial encounter in the Ocular Oncology service. We computed the percentage of cases with a positive family history of retinoblastoma in each these subgroups.
Results :
The frequency of familial retinoblastoma by subgroup in this series was as follows: Subgroup 1 ( 8/12/1980 through 1/24/1987) = 2 of 52 3.8% ; Subgroup 2 ( 1/25/1987 through 1/7/1998) = 4 of 52 7.7% ; Subgroup 3 ( 1/8/1998 through 10/28/2008) = 3 of 51 5.9% ; and Subgroup 4 ( 10/29/2008 through 6/29/2015) = 9 of 51 18%.
Conclusions :
Our results suggest a substantial increase in frequency of positive family history of retinoblastoma among recently encountered cases. If our results are confirmed by others investigators, they are likely to suggest a procreation advantage of genetic retinoblastoma cases managed by initial chemotherapy (which began to become widely available and employed as alternative to external beam radiation therapy (EBRT) by the mid to late 1990s) over the procreation experience of individuals with genetic retinoblastoma managed by EBRT.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2016 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, Wash., May 1-5, 2016.