The intracranial neoplastic diseases of childhood a description of their natural history based on a clinico-pathological study of 129 cases

Intracranial Meningiomas of Infancy, Childhood and Adolescence

“…The sex distribution was equal, a difference from the strong female predominance found in adults with men ingiomas [15,26,28], Onset was insidious with the average duration of symp toms being 1.5 years, compared to only 0.5 years reported in children har boring brain tumors of other types [6], Clinical signs were usually compatible with the location of the tumor. 23 (40%) of 58 children in which location was reported had parasagittal or convexity meningiomas.…”

“…Characteristic clinical and radiologic features are discussed in an attempt to identify settings where the diagnosis of intracranial meningioma should be considered in a child. Preoperative evaluation and outcome are also reviewed.Between 0.4 and 4.6% of intracranial neoplasms found in pediatric pa tients are meningiomas [1,6,14, 18, 24, 30, 40, 43, 46]. Up to 3% of all pa tients with meningiomas present to physicians in the first decade of life, and an additional 6% present in the second decade [15, 17, 28].…”

Intracranial Meningiomas in Children

“…On the left side, the canal was deroofed only, with the tumor left intact. The latter was done in an effort to preserve vision in the intact eye [1,2]. This case is identical to case 9 in …”

“…The average age at presentation of 11.6 years was almost double that of all other tumors at this institution (6.3 years) over a similar time period [23]. Males predominated in this series 3.3:1 and this lack of female predominance is common to other child hood series [1,2,7,9,13,17,21] with one exception [3] and contrasts markedly with the female preponderance seen in adult series.…”

“…Meningeal sarcomas, and other malignant tumors of meningeal origin, which are most common in infants and children, are acknowledged to behave in an aggressive fashion and to carry a poor prognosis [16]. A number of authors [1,3,4,9,14,17] have grouped meningeal sarcomas with meningiomas, under the general category of meningioma of childhood, or con sidered all meningeal tumors of childhood as one group. This resulted in a mortality rate of 42% [17] in one series of those patients available for follow-up.…”