Hydroxyurea for the treatment of recurrence and unresectable meningiomas: A systematic review

BACKGROUND: Meningioma is mostly benign tumor (World Health Organization Grade 1) and surgery remains the best option in treating symptomatic or enlarging meningiomas where total removal of the tumor is the goal of surgery. Radiation therapy has shown to be effective to cease the growth of the tumor, but not in tumor regression. Adjuvant therapy may treat patients with recurrence or unresectable meningiomas yet the uses of hormone therapy, immunotherapy, or chemotherapy had many results and were not consistently effective. Hydroxyurea has promising results in patients with meningiomas. AIM: This study analyzed the efficacy and safety of hydroxyurea for the treatments of recurrence or unresectable meningiomas. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The study adapted PRISMA guidelines by searching electronic databases, PUBMED, Cochrane, and JNS in August 2020 and was full-text observational study or randomized control trial presented as PICO and assessed using the risk-of-bias assessment tool. RESULTS: A total of six articles (157 patients with meningioma) were reviewed from the total of 425. Hydroxyurea was administered orally for 28 days continuously and repeated every 28 days or after recovery with various dosages in six studies. DISCUSSION: Administration of hydroxyurea showed a varied stable disease rate ranging from 30 to 69% with a median progression-free survival med varying between 2 and 27.75 months. The studies performed oral hydroxyurea administration at a dose of 20–30 mg/kg body weight/day or 1000 mg/m2/day. However, the adverse events (AEs) that appear also, based on literature, are not much different from other chemotherapy administrations. CONCLUSION: Patients with unresected and recurrent meningiomas have limited treatment options due to difficulty for surgical management. However, this study offers another perspective addressing the efficacy and safety results with the use of hydroxyurea. Overall, hydroxyurea showed good outcomes, particularly in low-grade meningioma, with relatively low AEs. Further combination treatment may be used as a multimodal therapy.