Clinical and pathological features in 49 elderly patients with meningiomas

BACKGROUND: As aging in elderly people, their brain tissue has degeneration and brain atrophy of different severity, and the volume of cranial cavity is relatively enlarged, it has greater compensatory ability to the space occupying lesion, and it is difficult to detect the meningioma because it grows to expand slowly, the tumor locates in non-functional region, and there are atypical symptoms and deficiency of localization signs. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the clinicopathologic features of senile meningiomas. DESIGN: A retrospective analysis. SETTING: Affiliated Hospital of Hebei University. PARTICIPANTS: Forty-nine elderly patients with meningioma were selected from the Department of Neurosurgery, Affiliated Hospital of Hebei University from May 1999 to March 2005, including 15 males and 34 females, 60-74 years of age, and they were all diagnosed by CT and MRI. METHODS: The sites of tumors were identified by CT and MRI examinations in all the patients. The tumors were partially or totally resected according to their own conditions. The types of the resected tumor were pathologically observed. The conditions of postoperative recovery were observed after 1, 3 and 6 months, and without new neurological dysfunction or complication was considered as good outcome. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: ① Sites and pathological types of the tumor; ② Postoperative outcomes and complications. RESULTS: All the 49 patients were involved in the analysis of results. ① The tumors had wide distributions with a main location in brain convexity. Among the 49 cases of meningioma, there were 25 cases of fibrocystic type, 12 cases of meningothelial type, 6 cases of psammomatous type, 4 cases of angiomatous type and 2 cases of microcystic type. ② Among the 49 patients, 35 had good outcome, 8 had self-care ability, 4 required care by others, 2 (4.1%) died postoperatively. No long-term complication related to the operation was observed during the follow-up postoperatively. CONCLUSION: Meningioma has a main location in brain convexity, and its pathological type is mainly fibrocystic one, and there is good operative outcome.