[Symptoms and diagnosis of tumors of the central nervous system in children].

Prognosis of brain tumors in children is altogether bad. For this reason it is necessary to diagnose brain tumors earlier as yet to improve the outcome. Symptoms of intracranial space occupying lesions are at first ambiguous: vomiting and headache, frequently associated with changes of behavior. Complaints of patients with brain tumors are multiple and progressive, in contradiction to patients suffering from spinal tumors showing only vague symptoms for a long time. Modern neuroimaging techniques such as sonography, computed tomography (CT) and nuclear magnetic resonance tomography (NMR) should be used early in patients with suspected symptoms.