Dorsal foramenal extraosseous epidural cavernous hemangioma

Solitary spinal epidural cavernous angioma: report of nine surgically treated cases and review of the literature

“…SSECA may occur anywhere along the spinal canal, but appear to have a predilection for the thoracic levels, with decreasing frequency at the cervical, lumbar and sacral levels. Of the reported cases, 58 % were in the thoracic, 26 % in the cervical, 16 % in the lumbar and almost none in the pure sacral location [7,8,18,21]. Our series include one in the sacral S1/2 level which was mistakenly operated as a L5/S1 disc disease and the SEC was neglected in the images.…”

“…Spinal cavernous angiomas are rare developmental vascular malformations and are clearly differentiated from vascular neoplasms [1,2,4,7,10,22]. They arise from the localized arrested development of blood vessel progenitors, are composed of dilated vascular spaces walled by thin endothelial cells, and there is no evidence that they may grow by mitotic activity [6,9,17].…”

“…Cavernous angiomas of the spine vary in size from a few millimeters to greater than 1 cm in diameter [7,19].…”

“…The spinal canal is less capacious in the thoracic area in comparison with the cervical and lumbosacral levels, allowing less space for an expanding epidural lesion, and thus a higher likelihood of epidural lesions becoming clinically symptomatic. Age and sex prevalence Most patients are in the 30-to 60-year-old age range, with a peak around 40 years [7,8,11,25], even though there have been reports including patients 23 months [6] to 81 years [13] old. According to the literature, 70 % of these lesions have been occurred in women [7,8,11].…”

“…They may occur in any part of the neuraxis [1,4,12,23,28], but are most commonly found in the supratentorial cerebral compartment [3,10,28]. In the spine, they are usually located in the vertebral bodies and comprise 5-12 % of all spinal hemangiomas [2,4,7,12,23,25]. Solitary spinal epidural cavernous angiomas (SSECA) are rare lesions [5,6,8,9,11,13,18,21,22,24].…”