Solitary spinal epidural cavernous angioma: report of nine surgically treated cases and review of the literature

We intend to report the largest series of spinal epidural cavernomas (SEC), discuss their clinical features, imaging characteristics, surgical findings, outcome analysis and compare them with similar reports in the literature.

Among the cases of spinal tumors treated surgically by the authors, there have been nine cases of SEC’s. All the data were collected prospectively and the cases have been followed after surgery up to the time of this analysis.

There were six female and three male patients with the ages ranging between 13 and 74 years. The lesions were located in the thoracic spine (4 cases), lumbar spine (4 cases) and one at the sacral level. Clinical presentations included acute spinal pain and paraparesis in two, low back pain and radiculopathy in five, and slowly progressive myelopathy in the other two cases. The lesion was iso-intense with the spinal cord in T1W images and hyperintense in T2W images and showed strong homogeneous enhancement after contrast medium injection in most of our cases. In the presence of hemorrhage inside the lesion, it was hyperintense in both T1W and T2W MR sequences as in our case 6. In the single case presenting with acute hemorrhage, epidural hematoma was the only finding, our case 1. Complete surgical removal was achieved in all our cases, and confirmed by postoperative MRI.

SEC is hard to be differentiated from other epidural spinal lesions before intervention but should be considered in the list of differential diagnosis regarding its favorable outcome.