Pediatric meningioma: current approaches and future direction

With improvement in leukemia therapy, central nervous system (CNS) tumors are the leading cause of cancer mortality in children and the most expensive of all human neoplasms to treat. Meningiomas are rare intracranial tumors in childhood and adolescence arising from arachnoid cell clonal outgrowth in the meninges. There have been no collaborative prospective therapeutic trials for pediatric meningioma because of its rarity, and the best evidence for management comes from retrospective case analyses and extrapolation from the treatment of adult meningioma. However this may not be ideal, because the underlying biology of adult and pediatric meningiomas seems to be different, as is the case for other CNS tumors. In addition, treatment of pediatric brain tumors requires consideration of long-term quality of life. This review reflects on what is currently known about pediatric meningiomas and opportunities for future directions.