[Neurologic diseases due to alterations in oncogenes and tumor suppressing genes]

Tumor growth is a dynamic combination of cell changes that confer a selective advantage for growth in vivo, implying the deregulation of processes that control cell proliferation along with the genesis of increasingly aggressive tumoral forms capable of invasion and metastasis. Such highly malignant tumors are the result of several alterations in genetic material, particularly in 2 types of genes: oncogenes and tumor suppressant genes that involve the activation and loss, respectively, of cell growth regulatory functions. Neurogenic tumors present either in the context of familial syndromes that predispose to cancer or sporadically, in individuals with no previous family history of neoplasia. The identification and description of some of the genes responsible for these syndromes has demonstrated that they generally are tumor suppressors that also participate actively in the genesis of sporadic forms of the same histological classes of tumor. We summarize recently acquired molecular understanding of syndromes that predispose to the development of neural tumors and review the available data on the sequence of molecular changes that contribute to neoplastic transformation and tumor progression toward aggressive forms in gliomas and meningiomas.