Comment

In their short illustrated review, Zustovich et al. [5], in addition to a clinico-pathological report of an interesting case of a sysematically metastasing anaplastic oligodendroglioma, present 32 previously reported examples from the world literature since 1951. It should be emphasized that case 3 and 11 in their Table 1 were the same patient, first published as a case report and later mentioned as case 1 in a series of extracranial metastases of anaplastic cerebral gliomas (their reference 24). However, these authors did not include a few further cases of extraneural metastasing oligodendrogliomas published previously: They include a child with a low-grade oligodendroglioma that recurred as a high-grade tumor and ultimately as extraneural systemic relapse, initially responsive to chemotherapy [1]. Another rare case of anaplastic oligodendroglioma with metastases outside the central nervous system was published in Polish [2]. A further oligodendroglioma with cervical lymph node metastases but without abstract was published in German [4], as was another case of ipsilateral cervical lymph node metastasis 4 years after a diagnostic biopsy and 2 years after removal of an anaplastic oligodendroglioma, respectively [3]. These latter authors emphasized that, in general, no relation between extraneural seeding and initial malignancy grade can be detected.