Rosetted glioneuronal tumour of the spine: clinical, histological and cytogenetic data

Excerpt

Since the appearance in 2000 of the World Health Organization classification for central nervous system neoplasms [5], numerous descriptions of new entities or variants have appeared in the literature. In the group of neuronal and mixed glioneuronal neoplasms are lesions with distinctive morphological features that are still not included in a precise classification (for a review see [1]). Glioneuronal tumours with neuropil-like islands (“rosetted glioneuronal tumours”) were reported a few years ago as a novel brain tumour entity with characteristic clinico-pathological features [10]. The initial report comprised four adult patients with supratentorial cerebral hemispheric masses with associated seizures. Since then, two more supratentorial adult cases have been added to the literature [4, 7], one of them in this journal by one of the current authors which also showed DNA copy number aberrations detected by comparative genomic hybridisation (CGH), consisting of a gain of chromosome 7q21.1-qter and loss of 9p21-pter [4]. All tumours were shown to be infiltrative in their histological growth pattern and predominantly glial in appearance, being composed mainly of fibrillary, gemistocytic, or protoplasmic astroglial elements. Their distinguishing feature was their content of sharply delimited, neuropil-like islands of intense synaptophysin reactivity inhabited and rimmed in rosetted fashion by cells demonstrating strong nuclear immunolabeling for the neuronal antigen NeuN. So far, only two cases of a spinal glioneuronal tumour with rosetted neuropil-like islands have been presented, consisting of a 44-year-old woman with recurrence and dural dissemination a year later [2] and an 8-year-old boy with possible recurrence and diffuse leptomeningeal enhancement after one year of follow-up [9]. …