[Epidemiology of acoustic neuromas in Poland]

In 1996 the Polish Skull Base Surgery Society was founded and assembled mainly otolaryngologists and neurosurgeons from several dozen clinics and hospital wards. Its main aim was to encourage co-operation between those two specialties. For this reason among others a common project entitled: "Epidemiology of acoustic neuromas in Poland" was launched in 1997. Information was collected from questionnaires in seven neurosurgery and in three laryngology centres in the years from 1997-1998. So far, no epidemiology of acoustic neuromas was established for the population of Poland. In this span of time 72 patients were operated. The agreement upon similar criteria, terminology and ways of evaluating the treatment results was quite a problem. Most cases were found in patients in their fifties (19 cases) and sixties (15 cases), mostly women. The average duration of the symptoms was 43 months. Large tumours predominated in the study group--T4 in the Samii (67%), and > 26 mm in the Tos (74%) classification. Most commonly, the patients were subjected to computer tomography in the preoperative period. All patients were treated surgically, with the retrosinusoid approach predominating. Only in one case, the translabyrinthal approach was used. Authors of this work are all participants of the project. Despite the fact that the number of performed operations is not too high, the fact of co-operative studies on the results by representatives of those two specialties can be considered a success. Hopefully, in the next years it will gradually be possible to widen the scope of the project and obtain more precise information.