Head circumference, brain weight, and tumor burden

The failure to diagnose an ependymoma at an appropriately early age led to an incomplete excision and a tumor burden too great for radiotherapy to control. The development of normative curves for brain weight correlated with head circumference allowed for the estimates of the extremes of possible growth rates of the tumor. The importance of early diagnosis and combined surgical and radiotherapies is emphasized since ependymomas are locally recurrent but curable by x-irradiation (and host macrophages?) if the tumor burden is small.