Intramedullary Spinal Cord Tumors

Abstract

Intramedullary spinal cord tumors (IMSCT) are rare lesions in the pediatric population, accounting for 4–8 % of central nervous system tumors in children (Bowers and Weprin 2003; DeSousa et al. 1979; Barker et al. 1976). They represent 55 % of intradural tumors in this age group (Yamamoto and Raffel 1999). They occur with an approximate incidence of 1 in 100,000, with 100–200 cases of pediatric IMSCTs diagnosed each year in the United States (Constantini and Epstein 1995; Constantini 1996). The majority of these lesions (nearly 60 %) are encountered in the cervical and thoracic regions and rarely involve the lumbar cord (Goh et al. 2000; Cooper 1989). They are distributed evenly between male and female patients (Goh et al. 1997). Primary glial tumors such as ependymomas and astrocytomas account for at least 80 % of IMSCTs (Cooper 1989; Cristante and Herrmann 1994; Epstein et al. 1993; Hoshimaru et al. 1999; McCormick et al. 1990b; Sandler et al. 1992). Other less common but reported pediatric IMSCT tumor types include ganglioglioma (Lang et al. 1993; Hayashi et al. 2011), oligodendroglioma (Miller 2000), and hemangioblastoma (Lang et al. 1993; Roonprapunt et al. 2001; Weil et al. 2003). Rarer still have been case reports of primitive neuroectodermal tumors (Alexiou et al. 2013), subependymoma (Miller and McCutcheon 2000), pleomorphic xanthoastrocytoma (Das et al. 2014), neurocytoma (Singh et al. 2007), schwannoma (Kim et al. 2009), teratoma (Isik et al. 2008), germinoma (Madhukar et al. 2013), and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (Bhushanam et al. 2014).