The never-ending struggle between the two souls of the neurosurgeon: To wait or to intervene

摘要

The "surgically" oriented attitude is challenged by other investigators who propound that an active surveillance might still be proposed in asymptomatic patients, as a wait-and-see policy has proved not to compromise patients' outcome if compared to early surgery (15, 18). With regard to the pediatric population, however, the necessity to intervene at diagnosis cannot be borrowed tout court from the data about LGG found in the literature, which mostly concerns the adult population. In fact, pediatric gliomas do not share the same biological profile of the adult counterpart. The risk of malignant transformation in pediatric LGG is less than 10% (2), and more frequently the tumors behave as stable or slow-growing lesions.