Surveillance neuroimaging in childhood intracranial ependymoma: how effective, how often, and for how long?

Abstract

Recurrent childhood ependymoma has a poor prognosis. The extent of the initial local tumor resection is the factor most closely associated with outcome. Surveillance imaging reveals a substantial number of asymptomatic recurrences, and survival appears to be improved in these patients compared with those identified by symptoms. The improvement in survival is thought to be greater than that expected just from earlier diagnosis.

Real‐time quantitative PCR analysis of pediatric ependymomas identifies novel candidate genes including TPR at 1q25 and CHIBBY at 22q12‐q13

“…Recent studies have identified patient age and extent of resection as significant prognostic factors in ependymomas (Figarella-Branger et al, 2000;Good et al, 2001;Jaing et al, 2004). In the present study, there was no significant association between the extent of surgical resection and incidence of recurrence, PFS or overall survival, which may be a consequence of varying subsequent treatments received following removal of the local primary tumor.…”

The Importance of Toxoplasma Gondii Infection in Diseases Presenting With Headaches. Headaches and Aseptic Meningitis May Be Manifestations of the Jarisch-Herxheimer Reaction

“…This suggestion may be supported by the fact that in congenital murine toxoplasmosis, coronal sections of the cerebrum revealed marked periventricular edema, subependymal nodules bulging into the ventricles, and loss of subependymal germinal cells (Stahl & Kaneda, 1998). One may therefore speculate that other forms of brain neoplasia, such as recurrent intracranial ependymoma and myxopapillary ependymoma presenting with or without intracranial hypertension (Drozdowski & Pogorzelski, 2005;Good et al, 2001;Labauge, Gros, Pages, Benezech, & Salvaing, 1984;Philippon, Poisson, & Bleibel, 1980;Tseng, Hsu, Jung, & Chen, 2004;Warnick et al, 1993), glioblastoma multiforme masquerading as PTC (Aroichane, Miller, & Eggenberger, 1993), gliomatosis (Weston & Lear, 1995), and gliomas associated with epilepsy (Schlehofer et al, 1999;Schwartzbaum et al, 2005), food production or processing (Schlehofer et al, 2005), or occupations of women in agricultural services and farming (Zheng, Cantor, Zhang, Keim, & Lynch, 2001), have been caused by chronic untreated inflammation process due to recurrent reactivation of latent CT. This is consistent with the finding that patients with neoplasia had a significantly higher prevalence of anti-Toxoplasma gondii antibodies compared with healthy controls (Yazar et al, 2004).…”

Interleukin-6 Covaries Inversely with Hippocampal Grey Matter Volume in Middle-Aged Adults

“…As a result, the relative volume change introduced by regional expansion and contraction during normalization was incorporated into each voxel value. This procedure yielded relative volumetric grey matter images conventionally referred to as optimized modulated VBM images (31,32). Prior to analysis, modulated (volumetric) grey matter images were smoothed with a 10mm FWHM Gaussian spatial filter.…”

“…To test this possibility, we employed a computational neuroanatomical procedure, optimized voxel-based morphometry (31,32), in a cross-sectional neuroimaging study to examine the association between plasma IL-6 levels and hippocampal grey matter volume in a subset of relatively healthy mid-life adults on whom we reported previously (28). In light of evidence that adipocytes are a primary source of circulating IL-6 (33) and that body fat covaries positively with IL-6 (34) and inversely with cognitive function (35), we also examined whether associations between IL-6 and hippocampal volume exist independently of percent body fat.…”