Hearing outcome following ?-knife treatment of vestibular schwannomas: A series of 33 cases

Abstract

Due to the progress in neuro-imaging vestibular schwannomas (benign tumors rooting from Scwann cells of vestibular nerve) witness an increase in incidence in the last decade. Despite the advances in operating techniques and intraoperative technologies used surgery still presents a rate of morbidity and mortality. Gamma-Knife became a therapeutic alternative for selected cases of vestibular schwannomas. However, the results of gamma-knife radiosurgery showed an influence on the audiograms of the patientstreated with this technique. The goal of our study is to assess the measure in which gamma-knife treatment influences the neuro-otologic behavior of these tumors. We study a series of the 33 consecutive cases which completed a 24 months follow-up after gamma-knife treatment. We use a neuroimagistic and neuro-otologic protocol aproved by our institution.
24 patients didn’t show a deterioration of the audiogram. Among these 11 report an unmodified hearing function, while 11 describe an improvement in hearing (we excluded the cases with complete hearing loss. 
We manage to show that strictly following the patient selection criteria for gamma-knife treatment, radiosurgery is a safe treatment option for the patients with small to medium-sized vestibular scwannomas.