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Is surgery for pineal cysts safe and effective? Short review

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Abstract

In this short review, the authors performed a database search and summarize current knowledge of the management of patients with pineal cysts (PCs) and investigate the role of surgical treatment. The scientific literature on the surgical treatment of PCs is sparse and encompasses only case series with little over 200 operated patients combined. All included papers reported favorable results after pineal cyst surgery with improvement of symptoms in most patients. Microsurgical resection of PCs, preferably using the supracerebellar-infratentorial approach, could be considered as a viable treatment option in symptomatic patients. Even patients with non-specific symptoms are reported to improve after surgery. However, evidence offered by this literature review is very limited and therefore our conclusions must be tempered by the restricted set of data. For ethical reasons, a randomized controlled trial is not an acceptable approach, and therefore patient registry could be a useful tool to identify a subset of symptomatic patients that might benefit from pineal cyst resection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurosurgery and Neurooncology, 1st Faculty of Medicine, Charles University, Military University Hospital, U Vojenske nemocnice, 1200, Prague 6, Czech Republic

    Martin Májovský, David Netuka & Vladimír Beneš

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  1. Martin Májovský
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  2. David Netuka
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  3. Vladimír Beneš
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Correspondence to David Netuka.

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Funding

This work was supported by grant no. MO 1012NK funded by the Ministry of Defense of the Czech Republic, grant no. 15-32791A funded by the Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic and grant no. Q25/LF1/2 funded by Charles University. The sponsors had no role in the design or conduct of this research.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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Májovský, M., Netuka, D. & Beneš, V. Is surgery for pineal cysts safe and effective? Short review. Neurosurg Rev 41, 119–124 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10143-017-0876-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10143-017-0876-2

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