Surgical treatment of symptomatic subependymoma of the nervous system. Report of five cases.

Subependymomas are uncommon and relatively benign tumors with a distinctive histological appearance. They are generally asymptomatic and most of them are found incidentally at postmortem examination. These tumors are usually located in the fourth and lateral ventricle, and sometimes in the spinal cord. The authors present a series of 5 pure subependymomas of the central nervous system all of which were symptomatic and all of which were treated by microsurgical removal. The clinico-pathological findings and the results of microsurgical treatment in this series are presented.