Treatment and diagnostics for abroad

Diagnosis of meningioma abroad

Small meningiomas are often discovered by chance, during preventive screenings.

The neurologist can also see individual symptoms and refer the patient for an examination, which includes:

• CT or MRI is the gold standard for diagnosing brain tumors, including meningiomas;
• angiography —it allows you to understand from which vessels the tumor receives nutrition, whether it interferes with the blood supply to the brain. This information will help the doctor plan the operation.

Indications for the treatment of meningioma abroad

A meningioma is a slow—growing tumor that may not manifest itself in any way during the patient's entire life. An asymptomatic course and the absence of a threat to health is a reason to abandon active treatment in favor of monitoring the patient's condition.

However, if the tumor reaches a large size, it can lead to weakness in the arms and legs, headaches, seizures, impaired vision, hearing, and speech. Also, some meningiomas may show malignant signs — rapid growth, germination in brain tissue, or even metastasis, despite the blood-brain barrier. In this case, the meningioma is removed surgically or with radiation therapy.

Meningioma treatment methods abroad

Meningiomas are removed surgically or by radiotherapy. Chemotherapy in the treatment of this type of tumors shows low effectiveness.

The operation most common abroad in the treatment of meningioma is a craniotomy, when a section of the skull is removed to give the surgeon access to the tumor. After surgery, the removed part of the bone is returned to its place. Due to the location of the tumor, less invasive methods (for example, through the nasal passage) are almost not used. Despite this, doctors are constantly looking for new techniques that will reduce the amount of intervention — for example, they use microsurgical instruments.

Radiation therapy is used as an aid to the destruction of tumor tissues that were not removed during surgery. Small meningiomas are sometimes removed only with radiotherapy or radiosurgery. The Gamma Knife and Cyber Knife are widely used, a robotic device that controls a linear accelerator to direct a high dose of radiation precisely at the tumor.