Khalatbari Mahmood, Amirjamshidi Abbas
Department of Neurosurgery, Arad General Hospital, Somaye Ave., Tehran, Iran.
Surg Neurol Int. 2011;2:114. doi: 10.4103/2152-7806.83734. Epub 2011 Aug 13.
It is almost an accepted scenario that trigeminal neuralgia (TN) occurs when there is a kind of vascular compression on the root entry zone of trigeminal nerve at pons. There are occasional reports about trigeminal neuralgia as the presenting sign of intracranial tumors but temporal glioma has rarely been included in the list.
We report three cases of temporal lobe glioma which presented with trigeminal neuralgia as the initial manifestation and review the relevant literature briefly. The patients were 19-, 20-, and 31-year-old males who presented with partially controlled TN. The tumor mass could be detected in paraclinical evaluations when the usual modalities of therapy for facial pain in our community were not effective. Excisional surgery led in full pain control in all the cases. Two of the patients died because of tumor recurrence after a year and the other one is being treated by adjuvants.
We add these types of intracranial tumors to the list of the etiologies for TN and the possible mechanisms for the initiation of pain in these types of intracranial tumors are discussed.
三叉神经痛（TN）发生于脑桥三叉神经根入区受到某种血管压迫时，这几乎是一种被广泛认可的情况。偶尔有关于三叉神经痛作为颅内肿瘤首发症状的报道，但颞叶胶质瘤很少被列入其中。
我们报告3例以三叉神经痛为首发表现的颞叶胶质瘤病例，并简要回顾相关文献。患者为19岁、20岁和31岁男性，均表现为部分可控的三叉神经痛。当社区常用的面部疼痛治疗方法无效时，在临床旁评估中可检测到肿瘤肿块。所有病例经手术切除后疼痛完全缓解。2例患者在术后1年因肿瘤复发死亡，另1例正在接受辅助治疗。
我们将这些类型的颅内肿瘤纳入三叉神经痛的病因列表，并讨论了这些类型颅内肿瘤引发疼痛的可能机制。
