Frequency of seizures in patients with newly diagnosed brain tumors: A retrospective review

Epilepsy: A Spectrum Disorder

“…Brain tumors account for 3.6% of all epilepsy and 12% of all acquired epilepsy (Lynam et al 2007;Van Breemen et al 2007). Epilepsy from brain tumors occurs at all ages, but a higher proportion in the 25-to 64-year-old age group.…”

Seizures in Children with Brain Tumours — Epidemiology, Significance, Management, and Outcomes

“…Among the various tumour histologies, tumours that are non-resectable due to infiltration, like high-grade astrocytomas, can be problematic over the patient's relatively brief period of survival [160]. However, as stated earlier, such highgrade lesions tend to be less often epileptogenic than their low-grade counterparts [32,87,91,113,140,141]. In long-term brain cancer survivors, glioneuronal tumours, and particularly low-grade gliomas, gangliogliomas and dysembryoplastic neuroepithelial tumours (DNETs), often produce quite drug-resistant epilepsy in children, so that complete surgical resection of the tumour is typically considered the primary focus of treatment [28, 61-63, 88, 94, 116, 132].…”

“…Virtually every possible tumour type has been reported presenting as seizures, especially lowgrade gliomas [27, 30, 32, 34, 37, 39, 70-72, 75, 76, 78, 91-93] and glioneuronal tumours like ganglioglioma and dysembryoplastic neuroepithelial tumour [28,44,62,73,88,89,91,94,95]; but including oligodendroglioma [77,96,97], cortical ependymoma [98], medulloblastoma [47], subependymal giant cell astrocytoma (SEGA) [99], meningioma [10] 0 , thalamic and cerebellar glioma [38,46], and a variety of atypical, systemic and metastatic tumours, like primary meningeal osteosarcoma [84], acute lymphoblastic leukemia [101], anaplastic large cell lymphoma [102], neuroblastoma [103], melanoma [104], various sarcomas [105,106], Ewing's sarcoma [107], malignant germ cell tumours [108], and others [16,109].…”

“…Although this intrinsically makes sense -the fewer the symptoms, the less aggressive or advanced the disease -extrapolating these findings to children must be done with caution, because a disproportionate number of paediatric lesions tend to be brainstem tumours that, though usually low-grade and non-epileptogenic, often are non-resectable because of their location and proximity to function-rich neural tissue [2,3,[137][138][139]. Nonetheless, especially among supratentorial lesions, it makes sense that having seizures present before all other symptoms develop is a hopeful prognostic sign, given that low-grade gliomas and other so-called benign lesions tend to be associated with much higher seizure rates than high-grade lesions [32,87,91,113,140,141].…”

Tumor-associated epilepsy

“…Intraaxial location may also influence epileptogenicity, with temporal or frontal lobe location being associated more with seizures than lesions in other lobes. 20,23,38,39 Infratentorial and sellar tumors seldom cause seizures.…”