[Resection of symptomatic intraspinal meningiomas]

Meningioma is one of the most common primary intraspinal tumours in adults. Most patients with this condition develop myelopathy or radiculopathy. The treatment of choice for these tumours is surgery, although few data are published on neurological outcome after surgery for intraspinal meningiomas. Patients are increasingly asking about the prognosis before they consent to surgery. This study aims at investigating operative morbidity and neurological outcome in a continuous surgical series in Norway.

The material comprised all 28 patients treated for histologically verified intraspinal meningioma at Rikshospitalet in the time period 1999 to 2003. All patients underwent new radiological and clinical assessments for study purposes.

We found that 96.5% of the patients were neurologically improved or unchanged after surgery. There was no recurrence, nor mortality. These findings match earlier reports in the literature. Morbidity was at 18%, this was higher than in other studies due to our wide definition of surgical morbidity. We conclude that surgery can be performed with excellent outcome, whilst the morbidity and mortality remain low.