Operative Treatment of Spinal Angiomas

Abstract

The operative treatment of spinal angiomas owes a lot to the crucial impulses toward improved diagnosis provided by selective spinal angiography and the technical advances resulting from microsurgery. Indications and operations have been extended, so that even intramedullary angiomas have become accessible. In spite of these improvements, there are many questions about indications and special operative procedures which remain obscure or debatable. A radical excision may be impossible on account of site, extent, complications of an already existing cord lesion, or for other reasons. Subtotal removals and other incomplete operative measures are debatable or are too little known, both in respect to their significance or to possible dangers to the cord. During recent years, intra-angiographic, intravascular embolization opened up an additional way of eliminating or influencing angiomas. Further problems have thus been posed regarding the indications and treatment, although for the present, the situation remains in a state of flux.